Subject: (urth) Where have you read something very like this before?

From: Alice K. Turner <aturner6 at nyc.rr.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 00:29:38 +0000

"Ah, America! Every image of it from the films is true, I thought to myself
as my oily-featured driver sped through amber lights and babbled maniacally
into his radio. The familiar smell (for this was my third visit) of a place
near the airport called Queens came to my nose. Which queen, or queens, were
referred to, however, no one could say. Power and greed and grand
Machiavellian scheming filled the very air along the avenue we travelled
on--Jackson Avenue, I think it was, no doubt named after the famous American
pop star possibly born nearby. Ferret-eyed mafiosi, underaged prostitutes,
neighborhood drug runners, confidence tricksters, and dreary lumpen nobodies
swarmed at every crossing and roundabout. Lying back on the odoriferous
upholstery, I drank in the teeming totality through every pore."

                                                     --Ian Frazier, Shouts &
Murmurs, The New Yorker, July 7

Shouts & Murmurs is the regular weekly short satire department of The New
Yorker, and Ian Frazier is a prolific and excellent writer. The above is the
first paragraph of the new one, and, trust me, it gets better. Those of you
who pick up the reference (which seems pitch-perfect, though I'm sure it's a
coincidence) might want to pick up the issue, or at least skim through the
short piece at a newsstand.

-alga

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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 04:01:30 +0000

alga quoted and wrote:

>                                                     --Ian Frazier, Shouts
&
>short piece at a newsstand.

Okay, I'll bite. It must be coincidence, because a nod to a Wolfe story in a
magazine like that would go unnoticed. Who among it's readers would ever
have read 7AN--besides you?

-Roy

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From: Alice K. Turner <aturner6 at nyc.rr.com>
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 12:41:31 +0000

----- Original Message -----
From: "Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey at stic.net>
To: "urth" <urth at urth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2003 12:01 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) Where have you read something very like this before?

> >                                                     --Ian Frazier,
Shouts
> >who pick up the reference (which seems pitch-perfect, though I'm sure
it's
> a

Both the tone and the stance throughout this short piece parallel "Seven
American Nights." Frazier is perfectly capable of  having read Wolfe. (For
many years, the regular sf columnist for the NY Times has been the New
Yorker editor Gerald Jonas, and New Yorker contributors--and readers--are an
eclectic lot.) However, I think that both writers are borrowing from a
third, the New Yorker satirist S.J. Perelman. Perelman has been dead for
some time, and never achieved the iconic status of Thurber or E.B. White,
but he was popular and prolific, and both Frazier and Wolfe surely read him;
he would have been of the generation just ahead of Wolfe's own. 7AN is
something of a stylistic departure for Wolfe and I'm guessing a Perelman
influence.

-alga

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