Word: trillins
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UNCIVIL LIBERTIES by Calvin Trillin...
Squirreled away in his safe-deposit box, Calvin Trillin keeps a list of prominent novelists who once sported Nehru jackets. Occasionally, he will take out this list and peruse the names the way a stamp collector savors his Luxembourg misprints. That is precisely what readers ought to do with Trillin's essays in Uncivil Liberties, originally written for the Nation from...
These ironic, deceptively light pieces touch on everything from weddings ("The quality of the food is in inverse proportion to the social position of the bride and groom") to social philosophy ("Nostalgia is fueled by inflation"). Trillin finds that American satirists live in "constant danger of being blindsided by the truth." His twofold defense against that danger: to reduce large questions to the microscopic (President Reagan named as his Surgeon General a doctor once known as "the Tummy Tuck King of Palm Beach") and to enlarge the trivial to the grotesque ("Am I the only person who favors...
...writers' association, dramatized their opposition to censorship by staging a public reading from the banned books at Manhattan's Public Theater. Among those reciting some famous-and forbidden-lines were John Irving, 40, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 64, Donald Barthelme, 51, Erica Jong, 40, E.L. Doctorow, 51, Calvin Trillin, 46, and Frances FitzGerald, 41. But perhaps the most impassioned protester was Actress Margaret Hamilton, 79, who in the 1939 film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz brought to life the character of the Wicked Witch of the West. Last week Hamilton did it again by reading from...
does not draw blood, it is perhaps because Trillin, now a New Yorker staff writer, seems to be writing benevolently with his nose pressed against the office window, looking in. For good or ill, satire requires both savagery and familiarity. The amiable Trillin has been away too long to give the shiv a final twist...