[...] I've published one slim volume of verse and some essays, but so has every other semiliterate writer in Cambridge. It's like owning a herd of cattle in my home state of Texas, publishing a book is.
X works for General Motors. All day long he performs a single repetitive task. The things he helps to make are not under his control. And yet he feels good. He is proud of the bustling capitalist economy; he may even be convinced that the capability to perform simple repetitive tasks is the only ca…
journalism can lead to a moment of real human connection between the reader and a world that they would not otherwise know
[...] What's so terrifying about the narrator's nightmares of adult life, over and above the supernatural horrors of The Exorcist, consists in the grim fact that there can be no maternal reassurance that there exists "nothing like what you just dreamed in the real world" (106).
The second example is footnote 119, a brief comment on the clause "guys in the Guy division have to slide out on a plastic telephone pole slathered with Vaseline (336-7). The footnote inserts a laconic "(the pole)", which combines rhetorical distance with a boundless "drive for disambiguation" to m…
