Proglottidean
"My memory is proglottidean, like the tapeworm, but unlike the tapeworm it has no head, it wanders in a maze, and any point may be the beginning or the end of its journey." So begins "The Gorge," by Umberto Eco, in the Mar. 7 New Yorker issue. Throwing a ridiculously word into the first sentence like that … I don't like it, but I look it up anyway. Here. The rest of the story is great.
Pages earlier, there's a cartoon more my speed. A bored-looking boss tells a too-smiley interviewee, "What the hell? We could use an idiot."
Adam Gopnik toes the intellectual line in the back of the book. Voltaire, Gopnik writes, was "thrown into the Bastille twice for being generally annoying."
When the topic gets to religion, we go pop: "Voltaire was in favor of a benign, supervisory God in the way that British leftists used to be in favor of the Queen, or in the way that Yankee free agents are in favor of Joe Torre; it's nice to think that someone genial is overseeing things."
More? The watches of the watch company Voltaire began "became the Ben & Jerry's ice cream of the later Enlightenment, a luxury good that was also a sign of progressive values."
Measure for measure, Nancy Franklin writes about a new TV series and describes one character as "SpongeJoe KhakiPants."
The referencing is thankfully absent from the key lines in Talk of the Town: "Hunter S. Thompson, who killed himself last week in his house in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, was a high-strung, thin-skinned, programmatically dissipated workaholic, inveterately suspicious of authority, perpetually worried that his best days were behind him, and unable to deal with the attention and success that he scrambled and sweated for many years to achieve. In other words, he was a magazine writer."
