Without a Stitch in Time: A Selection of the Best Humorous Short Pieces - Softcover

De Vries, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022617106X ISBN 13: 9780226171067

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. Without a Stitch in Time, a selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries’s nervous wit: the cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world. Noted as much for his verbal fluidity and wordplay as for his ability to see humor through pain, De Vries will delight both new readers and old in this uproarious modern masterpiece.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter De Vries (1910–93) was the man responsible for contributing to the cultural vernacular such witticisms as “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be” and “Deep down, he’s shallow.” He was the author of many books, including the classics Slouching Towards Kalamazoo and The Blood of the Lamb, both also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Without a Stitch in Time

A Selection of the Best Humorous Short Pieces

By Peter De Vries

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1972 Peter De Vries
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-17106-7

Contents

A Hard Day at the Office, 
Slice of Life, 
Flesh and the Devil, 
Mud in Your Eye, 
Afternoon of a Faun, 
Interior with Figures, 
Good Boy, 
Tulip, 
Every Leave That Falls, 
Compulsion, 
Scene, 
A Crying Need, 
In Defense of Self-pity; or, Prelude to Löwenbräu, 
The High Ground; or, Look, Ma, I'm Explicating, 
The Independent Voter at Twilight, 
The Conversational Ball, 
Adventures of a People Buff, 
Heart, 
Requiem for a Noun; or, Intruder in the Dusk, 
The House of Mirth, 
Split-level, 
Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold, 
From There to Infinity, 
Overture, 
Reuben, Reuben, 
Touch and Go, 
Fall Guy, 
You and Who Else?, 
Nobody's Fool, 
Block, 
Double or Nothing, 
Journey to the Center of the Room, 
Different Cultural Levels Eat Here, 
The Man Who Read Waugh, 
The Art of Self-dramatization; or, Forward from Schrecklichkeit, 
The Children's Hour; or, Hopscotch and Soda, 
The Irony of It All, 
Laughter in the Basement, 
Part of the Family Picture, 
You Know Me Alice, 
A Walk in the Country; or, How to Keep Fit to Be Tied, 
The Last of the Bluenoses, 
Scones and Stones, 
Forever Panting, 
James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock, 
Exploring Inner Space, 

CHAPTER 1

A HARD DAY AT THE OFFICE

I RECENTLY worked in an office where they had a number of those signs reading "Think," the motto of the International Business Machines Corporation, which so many other business firms seem to be adopting. The signs became almost at once a bone of contention between my employer and me, though not because I was not responsive to them; I have always reacted unqualifiedly to wall injunctions, especially the monosyllabic kind. Confronted, for example, with the exhortation "Smile," my face becomes wreathed in an expression of felicity that some people find unendurable, and as for "Keep On Keepin' On," I mean like one gander at it and it's "Oh, I will, I will!" The "Think" signs, one of which was visible from my desk, so I saw it every time I raised my head, were equally effective. As a consequence, by midmorning of my first day on the job I was so immersed in rumination that the boss, a ruddy, heavyset fellow named Harry Bagley, paused on his way past my desk, evidently struck by a remote and glazed look in my eye.

"What's the matter with you?" he asked.

"I was just thinking," I said, stirring from my concentration.

"What about?"

"Zeno's paradoxes," I answered. "The eight paradoxes by which he tries to discredit the belief in plurality and motion, and which have come down to us in the writings of Aristotle and Simplicius. I was recalling particularly the one about Achilles and the tortoise. You remember it. Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise for, while he traverses the distance between his starting point and that of the tortoise,the tortoise advances a certain distance, and while Achilles traverses this distance, the tortoise makes a further advance, and so on ad infinitum. Consequently, Achilles may run ad infinitum without overtaking the tortoise. Ergo there is no motion."

"A fat hell of a lot of good this is doing us," Bagley said.

"Oh, I know Zeno's old hat and, as you say, fruitless from a practical point of view," I said. "But here's the thought I want to leave with you. It's amazing how many of our values are still based on this classic logic, and so maybe the semanticists, under Korzybski and later Hayakawa, have been right in hammering home to us a less absolutistic approach to things."

"Yes, well, get some of this work off your desk," Bagley said, gesturing at a mulch of documents that had been thickening there since nine o'clock.

"Right," I said, and he bustled off.

I fell to with a will, and by noon was pretty well caught up. But as I sat down at my desk after lunch, my eye fell on the admonitory legend dominating the opposite wall, and I was soon again deep in a train of reflections, which, while lacking the abstruseness of my morning cogitations, were nevertheless not wholly without scope and erudition. My face must have betrayed the strain of application once more, for Bagley stopped as he had earlier.

"Now what?" he said.

I put down a paper knife I had been abstractedly bending.

"I've been thinking," I said, "that the element of the fantastic in the graphic arts is, historically speaking, so voluminous that it's presumptuous of the Surrealists to pretend that they have any more than given a contemporary label to an established, if not indeed hoary, vein. Take the chimerical detail in much Flemish and Renaissance painting, the dry, horrifying apparitions of Hieronymus Bosch —"

"Get your money," Bagley said.

"But why? What am I doing but what that sign says?" I protested, pointing to it.

"That sign doesn't mean this kind of thinking," Bagley said.

"What kind, then? What do you want me to think about?" I asked.

"Think about your work. Think about the product. Anything."

"All right, I'll try that," I said. "I'll try thinking about the product. But which one?" I added, for the firm was a wholesale-food company that handled many kinds of foods. I was at pains to remind Bagley of this. "So shall I think of food in general, or some particular item?" I asked. "Or some phase of distribution?"

"Oh, good God, I don't know," Bagley said impatiently. "Think of the special we're pushing," he said, and made off.

The special we were pushing just then was packaged mixed nuts, unshelled. The firm had been trying to ascertain what proportions people liked in mixed nuts — what ratio of walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, and so on — as reflected in relative sales of varying assortments that the company had been simultaneously putting out in different areas. I didn't see how any thinking on my part could help reach any conclusion about that, the more so because my work, which was checking and collating credit memoranda, offered no data along those lines. So I figured the best thing would be for me to dwell on nuts in a general way, which I did.

Shortly after four o'clock, I was aware of Bagley's bulk over me, and of Bagley looking down at me. "Well?" he said.

I turned to him in my swivel chair, crossing my legs.

"Nuts, it seems to me, have a quality that makes them unique among foods," I said. "I'm not thinking of their more obvious aspect as an autumnal symbol, their poetic association with festive periods. They have something else, a je ne sais quoi that has often haunted me while eating them but that I have never quite been able to pin down, despite that effort of imaginative physical identification that is the legitimate province of the senses."

"You're wearing me thin," Bagley warned.

"But now I think I've put my finger on the curious quality they have," I said. "Nuts are in effect edible wood."

"Get your money," Bagley said.

I rose. "I don't understand what you want," I exclaimed. "Granted the observation is a trifle on the precious side, is that any reason for firing a man? Give me a little time."

"You've got an hour till quitting time. Your money'll be ready then," Bagley said.

My money was...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022617106X
• ISBN 13: 9780226171067
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar