"Life Stories: profiles from the New Yorker"

[fiefoe]

"Time...Fortune...Life...Luce" (Henry Robinson Luce) / Wolcott Gibbs (1936)

    'Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.' Heh.
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"Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody" (Heloise) / Ian Frazier (1983)

   There's something herculean about Heloise (and her daughter Ponce, who took up her mantle after she passed away), even to the domestically indifferent, (speaking for myself at least). Through her "Hints from Heloise" column, she has illuminated myriad domestic problems that hitherto 'languish(ed) in the limbo of real but unnamed things': soda straws sticking out of bag lunches, one drinking glass sticking inside another, quilts sliding off the bed...

    Wouldn't you know it, Heloise, who firmly believed that homemakers are 'the precious backbone of the world', called Texas home. The title of the article refers to her rather aggressively egalitarian attitude. As Ian Frazier reads it, she was proud to be a smartie, as opposed to an intellectual. Taken together, what she stands for on the philosophical end seems to invite gentle irony. Or maybe that's what the writer wants me to feel. (He does go out of his way to report that the motel he stayed at in Fort Worth turned out to be biggest rut hut around.)

    With confident advice like "Don't ever, and I mean ever, put hot grease down your sink drain", I'm always left feeling paranoid -- what other triple NEVER rules don't I know about? The jungle is not only out there...