Word: yardley
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Both, as it turned out, and the Washington Post book critic and columnist Jonathan Yardley engagingly examines this double identity in Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley (Random House; 255 pages; $23). Yardley makes no inflated claims on behalf of his subject: "Fred was a professional writer, although only one of his three books [A Fan's Notes] will long remain in print." But Exley (1929-1992) intensely interested and exasperated his readers, relatives, friends, casual acquaintances and the victims of his odd-hours telephone monologues, among whom Yardley and this reviewer number themselves. "What a piece of work...
...work, mostly, although Yardley renders this verdict gently. A normal boy growing up in Watertown, N.Y., Exley took some hits during his senior year in high school--the death of his football-hero father, an auto accident that ended his own dreams of gridiron glory--and, after majoring in English at the University of Southern California, eventually became a charming monster of self-indulgence. Women, beginning with his mother, lined up to mother him. He had two wives and physically abused them both. He drank incessantly: "There are people who knew him for years and never, to their knowledge...
...Other Beltway's language does have the edge in one respect: informality. I felt no qualm about E-mailing "Hi Joel" to someone I had never met. ("Hi Jon," I E-mailed to Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley when he announced that he'd gone online, adding helpfully, "This is the proper form of salutation in cyberspace." Yardley answered, jokingly, "Dear Mr. Kinsley: This is the proper form of salutation in Washington.") The same informality applies to dress, which in this world--where style is set by barely socialized young computer geeks--has moved beyond the studied informality...
...contrast to these technology-obsessed works, Gabriel Orozco contributes a table cluttered with quiet, ephemeral models. His attention to materials and tiny scale transforms dried oranges, spotted seed pods, a papier mache mold of a sock, and a tower of Yardley soap boxes into intimate marvels. These laconic sculptures demand (and deserve) our thought and time, as do Orozco's elegant photographs which reveal his sensitivity to natural mysteries and visual puns, like a cluster of sleeping sheep in Common Dream, or a languid hose seeping water on the floor in Hose (Manguera Dormida). His small, subtle observations play beautifully...
...used violence to gain their ends, killed, maimed and fostered civil disorder. Thoreau was a man of learning who gave sage instruction. The Unabomber is a man of cunning who wreaks violent destruction. One seeks to define the meaning of life; the other violates it. LEE G. MESTRES Yardley, Pennsylvania...