Word: salesman
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...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...
...that will strike many scientists who study the brain as puzzling, if not downright ludicrous. Neurobiologists, in particular, will find much to quibble with in How the Mind Works--which is not surprising, since Pinker comes at the subject from an entirely different perspective. The son of a traveling salesman, Pinker grew up in Montreal and attended McGill University, where he became fascinated with the psychology of perception and cognition. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard, then moved a few blocks down Massachusetts Avenue to M.I.T., linguist Chomsky's home base. Chomsky's seminal theory--that humans come into...
...each user can win a given reward only once, should prevent tech-heads from hacking the system. Such security will be crucial to Goldhaber's goal of making CyberGold central to the world of online commerce. "Attention must be paid!" cries Willy Loman's wife in Death of a Salesman. Perhaps it's about to start paying really well...