Word: cardboarded
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Steve Christensen had just stepped out of the elevator en route to his sixth- floor office in Salt Lake City, one arm filled with Cokes and doughnuts for an early-morning meeting. At his office door, Christensen, 31, reached down to pick up a cardboard parcel with his name on it, and a shrapnel-filled bomb inside blew up in his face, killing him. Some 90 minutes later, in the hilly suburb of Holladay southeast of the city, Kathleen Sheets, 50, returned home from a walk. She bent down to pick up a curious package, with her husband's name...
...Palomar is puppet voyeur of the earthly, the bizarre, the cosmic. Frustrated by the naked breast of a sunbathing woman who misreads his truly beachcombing intentions, confused in his reading of the heavens against a cardboard constellation chart, he shuns both celestial bodies and tanned ones, for the "certainty" in the refraction index of his own clumsy corrective lenses. Like a misplaced, compulsive Descartes, checking the stars to make sure nothing has changed, Mr. Palomar makes rules for himself: he must stick to what he sees...
Sincerity, that most elusive of virtues, is the one thing that only an individual can truly know, and simultaneously the one virtue that cannot be expressed simply, unlike so many cardboard cinema emotions. What really could be more phony than Richard Nixon's claim, straining for the sincerity he would never achieve, that "I am not a crook"? He who doth protest ... dispenses with any chance of conveying more than the ersatz...
...still devoted to "quiet, workmanlike, parochial novels" like those of Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor. "I'm not against that," he says. "I'm just against the idea that it's the only way to write novels and be esteemed in Oxbridge." Floods of mail, piling up in cardboard boxes around his desk, assure him that he is esteemed around the world. But for someone worried about finding time to finish all his projected books, this too can be a burden. "The most appalling letters," he groans, "are the ones that say, 'I've got a wonderful story...
...suffused with a soft-focus romanticism. Firelight plays over the fantasy. Everyone seems amazingly successful. The columns are populated by Ph.D.s. Sometimes one encounters a millionaire. Occasionally a satirical wit breaks the monotony: "I am DWM, wino, no teeth, smell bad, age 40--look 75. Live in good cardboard box in low- traffic alley. You are under 25, tall, sophisticated, beautiful, talented, financially secure, and want more out of life. Come fly with...