Word: schoolboys
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...executives, a life passes in review. There are references to young Raymond who wrote "clever and snotty" critiques for an English periodical. That occupation later made him suspicious of all critics, including W.H. Auden, who praised his works as art, and Edmund Wilson. At the age of 51, the schoolboy raised on Latin and Greek becomes a novelist (The Big Sleep, 1939), trying to make the detective story "respectable and even dignified." It grew so respectable that Chandler could laugh when S. J. Perelman parodied Marlowe's hard-boiled approach in "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer": "Her eyes narrowed...
...from the coming apocalypse, there is a growing shelf concerned solely with mastering that infuriating, six-sided, six-colored, 27-part boggler with 42.3 quintillion possible combinations known as Rubik's Cube. The latest entry: You Can Do the Cube (Penguin; $1.95) by Patrick Bossert, 13, a London schoolboy who discovered the cube only this spring during a family ski vacation in Switzerland. Within five days he had mastered the monster, and later began selling his schoolmates a four-page, mimeographed tip sheet for 45?. An alert editor at Penguin saw a copy and persuaded the prodigy to turn...
...Barton, from Toronto, favors contemporary fantasies, steeped in rue and irony, like The Porcelain Man by Richard Kennedy. With his bemused schoolboy's face, Barton roams the stage, bending at the waist to beseech from his listeners the sympathy due this magically animated figure of China who-would you believe it?-falls in love but, alas, keeps smashing himself into pieces and being reassembled as a porcelain horse or, worse, a dinner set just before he can properly go awooing...
...every ex-schoolboy has probably forgotten, Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption" after examining the untaxed sachems of the Gilded Age, their mansions, yachts, gargantuan dinner parties and cyclopean stickpins. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) Veblen did not hide his disdain for such display. He belonged to an era of sociology before it married computer science, bred statistics and headed for the neutral horizons of market research...
...seemly; the consort's luster must not dim the King. Eventually, as Queen, Lady Diana will wear a crown with the 109-carat Kohinoor diamond as its centerpiece. This royal geegaw has been out of circulation for years. Watching Lady Diana, whether accepting a flower from a schoolboy or negotiating a receiving line, one wonders for a moment if such a crown might not be . . . well, yes, superfluous. Good enough, really, just to see her smile...