Word: fannings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Language, like the world it represents, can never be static. Even today the pun survives fitfully in tabloid headlines: JUDGES WEIGH FAN DANCER'S ACT, FIND IT WANTON. It survives in the humor of S.J. Perelman, the only post-Joycean writer capable of fluent bilingual flippancy: "lox vobiscum," "the Saucier's Apprentice," and the neo-Joycean "Anna Trivia Pluralized." The pun makes its happiest regular appearance in the work of Novelist Peter De Vries, who writes stories about compulsive punners. "I can't stop," he claims. "I even dream verbal puns. Like the one in which...
...eleven I was hiring the household staff. I'd tell them that the hours wouldn't be the same as in other households, but that they wouldn't be asked to do anything outrageous. I'd call the police to check the chauffeurs' references. I began answering Mama's fan mail when I was eleven too. She paid me $3 a week until I complained that the work was too much for me; then I got $5 a week. When I was 14, I drove my sister and brother to school and back because our chauffeur was drunk...
...Chris kept her older opponent running with a maddening array of pinpoint placements, drop shots and lobs and-when an opening came-a two-fisted backhand drive down the line. In the final game, when the tenacious Billie Jean fought back from match point five times, one excited fan yelled: "Get it over with!" Chris, who usually plays with a poker-faced poise that one of her opponents describes as "almost eerie," shouted back: "I'm trying." Then, trying harder, she scored on a solid forehand...
Died. Marianne Moore, 84, America's premier poetess and baseball fan; in Manhattan. Born in suburban St. Louis, Miss Moore graduated from Bryn Mawr, taught for a time, but soon discovered her vocation: writing meticulously crafted poems in which, as she once said, "the words simply cluster like chromosomes." A consummate alchemist at turning trivia into metaphysical gold, Miss Moore was once described by Robert Lowell quite simply as "the best woman poet in English." She often celebrated in verse the serendipitous loves of her active life: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, animals, plants, tricorn hats, health foods, the subway. Sprightly...
...Prabang is a tall hill that rises suddenly and provides an excellent view of the city, its airport, and the surrounding valley which is circled by more abrupt mountains. At night I climbed with several friends to the top of the hill. We watched the airplanes take off and fan out over the mountains. Shortly afterwards the horizon would light up from the explosion of bombs. This was repeated about every ten minutes. When I asked a Lao friend what targets were just over the mountains he said no one lived there any more. Everyone had been told to move...