Word: salesman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...many miles, so little time. For Ron Remer, 47, a soft-spoken salesman, offensive driving was simply part of the job. From his home in New Haven, Conn., he logged 30,000 miles a year selling promotional products. "People on the road were an impediment to my progress," he says. "If I was late, it would reflect badly on me. Maybe the customer wouldn't want the products, and I'd be out of a sale. Getting there was the only thing that was important. If I met you in person, I might invite you for coffee or something...
...sure Quentin Tarantino has rubbed that pup's belly--explaining feelingly to a wheedling New York Times or an absurd Charlie Rose about how the borrowing of mediocre orchestral tracks from '70s B-movie is a gesture of high art. He's a used car salesman, but the problem is, people are actually snapping up the Gremlins and Pintos he purveys...
...National confidence congealed into a deep gloom as headlines warned of the coming "Great Depression." The government that for so many decades guided the economy with an iron hand is floundering, seemingly at a loss for ways to yank the country out of its tailspin. Kazumi Ehara, an auto salesman in suburban Tokyo, speaks for many of his countrymen when he says, "The Japanese people have been told repeatedly by the government that the economy will get better, only to be betrayed. I can no longer trust them...
From this surreal material, delivered in prose reminiscent of the best of Clarence Major's fiction, Cliff confronts the Americanization of not only the Caribbean but the world, finding poetry in every image and line. "A salesman is free, he tells himself...People look forward to his arrival, and not just for the goods he carries. He is part troubadour...
...story that comes closest to Wolff's stunningly rendered "Powder" is "Transactions" by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff (No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng). As wonderfully bizarre as it poetic, it tells the story of a traveling salesman hawking American goods and culture ("Witch hazel. Superman. Band-Aids, Zane Grey. Chili Con carne...Camels") on a Caribbean island who buys a poor German girl that he finds on the roadside. Before taking the girl home to his sterile wife, they go to an enchanted spring/hotel/tourist attraction run by a woman with an obsession with Jet magazine...