Word: one
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...address and punch in the first three digits of the ZIP code, which is then translated into a bar-code symbol for sorting mail by carrier route. With no way to slow down the machine, the clerk is like Lucille Ball in her comic routine at a candy factory. One moment, Lucy is standing at the conveyor belt blithely wrapping individual candies; the next she is stuffing unwrapped chocolates under her hat, down her dress and into her bulging mouth. Fudge caramels spill onto the floor. Lucy is fired...
Until Dale Carnegie takes hold as the new model for postal supervisors, one postmaster has a low-tech idea for improving service in Worthington, Ohio. For every letter misdelivered, the postman refunds the cost of the stamp to the customer out of his own pocket. Since September, 44 quarters have been paid out and complaints have dropped from ten a week to one...
These and other episodes are presented out of order because, writes Sinyavsky, "the past cannot be grasped in sequence." Realism, too, is all thumbs. In order to re-create the bizarre atmosphere of his KGB interrogation, the author restages the experience as a one-act farce. Karl could have been one of the Marx Brothers. Some typical dialogue between writer and inquisitor...
...pouch of fiction, Sinyavsky demonstrates the range of his virtuosity and literary cunning by echoing some Russian masters: Gogol of the satiric Dead Souls, Dostoyevsky of the subversive Notes from Underground, Turgenev of the pastoral Fathers and Sons, Nabokov of the evocative Speak, Memory. It is a special tradition, one in which publish or perish could have just as easily meant publish and perish...
Industry and financial experts could only conclude that the problem lay with the company's founders, brothers Charles and Maurice Saatchi. Over the past four years, both men have increasingly withdrawn from the firm's day-to-day * oversight. Charles, 46, has spent much of his time becoming one of the world's most voracious art collectors, sometimes buying entire exhibitions at a single gulp. Now he is unloading scores of works at the hyperprices his frenetic buying helped create. Maurice, 43, though not as aloof as his sibling, spends less and less time with Saatchi & Saatchi employees and clients...