From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Where have you read something very like this before?
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2003 23:01:30 -0500

alga quoted and wrote:

>"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.


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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