Sublime

inchoate

railed as he

“Rude Boy”

Joseph Heller and Stanley Kubrick heightened the truth about war just enough to catch its lunacy, and we recognize it as lunacy. The joke is no joke.

I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J. D. Salinger or John Cheever or John Collier or John O‘Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O’Connor

His job consisted of watching monitors all day and expecting people to be dishonest assholes.

The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.