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Six Word Stories Say So Much

6/28/2011

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Ernest Hemingway, legend has it, wrote the following story:

For sale:  baby shoes, never worn.


:(  A baby died before it could wear shoes.  The parents are so poor they have to sell the shoes for food and rent.  They can’t even afford a decent classified ad.  That’s so powerful.  :(

Well... Maybe the parents are doing OK, financially.  Not living large, but not sweating the occasional night out either.  Here they are just like, “Sucks that the baby died.  Still, we should get something for the shoes.  Should I take out the ad or do you want to?” 

Nah, that’s not it.  The baby is basically fine, just born without feet.  Parents are like, “Shoes would be a pretense.” 

No, hold on…. OK, I get it—frickin’ baby has really, really big feet.  Baby shoes just won’t cut it, so the parents have to buy it grown-man shoes.  Maybe the six-word title to Hemingway’s six-word story, unknown till now, was, “The Eight-Pound Baby With Size Thirteens.” 

Wait!  Fucking baby has FINS.  YES.  Moms popped out a fishbaby.  Dad's all “Tell you what:  I’m ‘a sell these shoes and buy fishbaby a goddamn tank with all the ca$h that transaction brings in.  Next, we learn his ass to swim—like, now—and he’ll be in the Olympics before he turns three!”  Then he stares out into space and pictures the headlines:
FISHBABY VICTORIOUS!
China’s “Octopusman” Wins Silver

Man, it is amazing how much can fit into six words.
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To the Editors of Penthouse

6/21/2011

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Sir,

It was a hot, steamy afternoon.  I was lounging by the pool of my singles apartment complex, just passing the time and feeling the breeze.  Reading, doing push-ups, catching some rays…   You can’t use the pool because we have a very serious black algae problem.  I guess it’s a bitch to fix.  Supposedly they’re working on it.



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Patrick Leigh Fermor, Agnostic

6/16/2011

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It’s impossible not to romanticize Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last week at 96. 

When he was 18 he got booted from military school, so did the logical thing:  walked alone from Holland to Constantinople, sleeping in forests, farmhouses, bars—wherever he set down his pack.  During World War II he and a band of British commandos parachuted into Nazi-occupied Crete and set up shop “disguised as Cretan shepherds, complete with black turbans and sashes and armed with silver-and-ivory daggers.”*  In 1944 he kidnapped a German general—not something I’ve done, but I assume it was exciting. 


Picture
After the war he became a writer.  He picked up languages like the rest of us pick up colds:  ancient and modern Greek, Latin, French, among others.  His English vocabulary could shame the OED.  His prose is so fine it’s as much precision engineering as writing.  Author of 8 or so travel books, he stood, I gather, about 6’2”, looked like that (←) and was, in the parlance of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a “008.”  (Royal Breast Inspector.) 
 
This is a biographical sketch, emphasis on sketch.  I'm not an expert on the man.  I have only read one of his books and portions of another.  So, these are the impressions of a casual reader relatively new to his work.  (However, all of the above—from his hike to Turkey to kidnapping the general—is true.  Except for the 008 part, alas.)  I have read several magazine pieces about him—Anthony Lane’s from the New Yorker is great—and whenever I do, I envy him.  Or maybe I envy the image as it appears in profiles, but I envy it to the point that I wish I was him.  Even in old age he seemed far cooler than the rest of us.  In Anthony Lane’s profile, he tells this anecdote of hanging with an 83-year-old Leigh Fermor in Crete:




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Thing I Wrote in January

6/6/2011

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I wrote the following essay in January and submitted it to a certain public radio news program that considers the sheer totality of Things.  After editors therein declared it “hot” yet “way too in my face,” I went on to do other stuff with my life.  I just found this and was like, “OK, I will post it after I edit it a bit.”  Enjoy.

Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa offer a dismal portrait of contemporary American colleges in their new book, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses," by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, who are sociologists.  For two years they studied like 2,300 students.  What they discovered made them absolutely lose their minds.


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Foul Language and the NBA (Get it?)

6/1/2011

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Here's an essay I read at Ricochet's bar in Lincoln Square.  T-shirt purchased at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin in the summer of 1989.

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    About Dennis

    Dennis O'Toole is a all-set cobra jet creepin' through the nighttime.  He lives in Chicago. 

    If you need to reach me, dial:
    denotoole AT SYMBOL gmail PERIOD CHARACTER co LETTER M.  



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