Word: trillins
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...Trillin is like Paul Revere's ride--a little light in the belfry...
...while life's absurdity can be tiring and annoying, it also produces its pleasures. Calvin Trillin is one of them. Among columnists today he has the most highly developed sense of how the swirling currents of history are usually the scene of the common mans belly-flop. It is a talent that prompts him to write sentences like, "My grandfather grew up in one of those European towns that used to change countries every week or ten days and the only claim to distinction I ever heard him make was that he had deserted two separate armies...
This is in a piece in which Trillin explains his reaction to an offer in the mail of a replica of his family's Coat of Arms. "It's got a lovely border, with a bribed immigration officer looking away from it. The center section has crossed steerage tickets rampant on a field of greenhorns...
...mentioned that Trillin is a columnist. He is not particularly well-known, however, because he writes his satirical columns for The Nation, the far-left weekly magazine (a "pinko rag" the author calls it, perhaps covering himself as a patriotic infiltrator for the next Red Scare) that hides in the rear racks at Out-of-Town News and has a circulation which competes neck and neck with The Crimson's. Thus the great virtue, of this predictably superb sampling of his column, Uncivil Liberties: you actually get to read the pieces, rather than hear about them second-hand from...
Those who follow the column will rejoice at this second helping of Trillin's Nation material (the first collection of these columns, Uncivil Liberties, was published in 1982). But I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is reason to believe Trillin is becoming, as my mother used to put it, "a bit like Paul Revere's ride--a little light in the belfry...