Word: trillins
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Humorist Calvin Trillin at Beloit College, Beloit, Wis.: I have divided up the United States into two sections. One section is the part of the U.S. that had major league baseball before the Second World War. That's the ancien U.S., and the rest of the U.S. is the rest of the U.S. That's the second part that's called the expansion-team U.S. -- where we stand today. The way you can tell the difference is that the old U.S. still has regular European ethnic neighborhoods, and in an Italian restaurant in the ancien U.S., the waiters have names...
...have an appealing goal in sight: a friendly kaffee- klatsch in the tradition of radio's long-running The Breakfast Club. Some of the ideas work. Bob Saget, the show's announcer and "sidekick," narrated a funny home video of his own wedding. Writers Roy Blount Jr. and Calvin Trillin were on hand with wry commentaries. And a few of the segments (like an interview with a Wall Street executive at the gym where he goes boxing before work) struck just the right, what's-new-this-morning? tone...
...Yorker's offices to protest the move. After several splenetic speeches against Newhouse, they decided to draft a letter to Gottlieb asking him to step aside in favor of an in-house candidate. The three-paragraph message was signed by 154 people, including Roger Angell, Ann Beattie, Calvin Trillin and even the hermitic J.D. Salinger, who has not published a short story in The New Yorker since 1965. "It is our strange and powerfully held conviction," read the letter, "that only an editor who has been a long-standing member of the staff will have a reasonable chance of assuring...
There is a larger point to make here though and it's this: as Trillin feared, the absurdity of reality is catching up on him. In the introduction to Uncivil Liberties, Trillin explains that the challenge to an American humorist is to "concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses ... in other words ... when Ronald Reagan appointed as Deputy Secretary of State a man who could not name the Prime Minister of South Africa, some Sunday newspaper satirist somewhere in America was groaning at having his joke...
...other hand, there could be a salutary aspect to the escalation of absurdity. May be those Russian missles actually won't work. Let's hope so, if only that Calvin Trillin can keep writing