Word: smells
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...COMIC short stories, VERTIGO PARK AND OTHER TALL TALES (Knopf; $18), is like a literary version of Saturday Night Live -- a boatload of strained laughs mixed with a few great jokes that keep the whole thing afloat. Bright spots: "She didn't realize deliberate perkiness offended, the way the smell of ammonia becomes associated with the odors it's supposed to remove," and "Necessity is the mother of affection," and "Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the books of you?" There are pieces about Samuel Beckett, obsessed fans and psychics. It's a fitfully amusing...
...chief scientist, Jan Beyea, was in on all these decisions. Even so, he was stunned by one result of the effort: an odorless building. "A month before we moved in, I'm walking around, and they are painting the walls and laying down the rugs and I can't smell anything," Beyea recalls. "That shows we did our job." Beyea attributes the facility's overall success to "a hundred, maybe several hundred, different little things, each of which by itself is rather insignificant...
...catalog presents quite a riff on this subject when it reflects on what might strike the unprepared visitor as the wretched pictorial ineptitude of such artists as Sue Williams, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley and Karen Kilimnik. (Williams can't draw at all, although her installation The Sweet and Pungent Smell of Success includes a dandy splotch of plastic vomit.) Their work, says the catalog, "deliberately renounces success and power in favor of the degraded and dysfunctional, transforming deficiencies into something positive in true Warholian fashion." Presumably if they weren't vigilant with themselves, they might turn into teensy Titians, engorged...
...very own Garden of Eden. Mount Auburn Street could be a million miles away. This fall the energetic House Committee sent two busloads of Lowellians to romp in the leaves of western Massachusetts. The Winter Waltz brings Vienna to your very own dining hall. In the spring you can smell the roses that one of the tutors cares for so reverently, and you can help set off the "cannons" for the annual open-air read-through of the 1812 Overture. And what other house hosts the longest running opera in New England...
...novelist King generally benches herself after a hyperbolic airball or two. Wisely she sidesteps the artificiality (author's choice, after all) of pivoting her story on winning or losing the big games. Her teenagers of both sexes are believably psychotic, and both locker rooms have the edgy, acrid smell of a zoo just before feeding time...