Word: incisors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Giles's mother's mouth comprised, from left to right, a tapering upper eyetooth which eroded a millimeter a year into the black pool of her gum socket, two long wedge-shaped frontals which overlapped like tightly crossed fingers...a lower incisor as yellow as sunshine off dusty grass, an El that resembled a squat, burnt-out matchstick, and a lonely lopsided masticator which jutted out between her lips even when they were closed...
...romantic novel in the cold clear rays of le mot juste. Here he is, describing a dancing girl named Kuchuk as she begins her writhings: "A tall splendid creature . . . When she bends, her flesh ripples into bronze ridges . . . heavy shoulders, full apple-shaped breasts . . . She has one upper incisor, right, which is beginning...
That tarnished incisor was the herald of a literary revolution: the precise, unexpected, vivifying detail added to the general statement, which was to be the mark of serious fiction for the next century. While Flaubert was reveling in the exotic surroundings, he was mulling over a novel about life back in humdrum Normandy, where he knew the people and spoke the language. Accord ing to Du Camp (and Steegmuller tends to believe him) it was on a barren hill overlooking the Second Cataract of the Nile that he cried: "Eureka! I will call her Emma Bovary...
Superrocker Mick Jogger of the Rolling Stones used to sing one song called Ruby Tuesday. But it was a Wednesday evening when Mick went to the dentist with a small ruby and asked him to insert it in his upper right incisor (one of the few sound teeth he has left). Now he is not so sure he likes the effect and is thinking of having it removed...
PERELMAN'S subjects range from reminiscences of the Marx Brothers to an encounter with a singing lady dentist who plants a radio transmitter in his incisor and calls him up when she hears him eating a forbidden bagel ("Lock Lips-Monkey-shines in the Bridgework"). Very rarely does he have any real satiric intentions. In one piece, though, "Let a Snarl Be Your Umbrella," there is a hint of very good-natured satire. Perelman finds himself ignored, insulted, and humiliated by a series of British clerks, in what appears to be a conspiracy to make the customer suffer. He discovers...