Born Eighty Years Ago Today

My favorite author ever, Stanley Elkin.

Where has he seen these men? Their sports coats are the nubby textures and patterns of upholstery from credit furniture supplements in Sunday newspapers. They are crosshatched, double knits, drapery, checks like optical illusions, designs like aerial photographs of Kansas, Pennsylvania pastureland, or the russets of erosion in western national parks. The pockets of their blazers are slashed, angled as bannister. Change would fall out of their pockets, he thinks. The flaps are mock, shaped like the lower halves of badges. Their notched, pointed collars ride their shoulders like the conferral of wide, mysterious honors, the mantles of secret orders - and Flesh supposes they belong to these. He has never seen such shoes. Many are glossy white loafers, the color and sheen of wet teeth in ads. Gratuitous, useless buckles vault the white piping that rises from their shoes like welts. The jewelry and fixtures in the center of their false straps could be I.D. tags, or metal tablets, or slender sunken scutcheons. He sees no belts in the tight cuneiform-print trousers, in the plaids like colored grids, like cage, windowpanes, that climb their legs like ladders. The pants hold themselves up, self-supportive, a flap of fabric buttoned to a rim of itself like flesh sealed to flesh in operations. He marvels at their bump-toe shoes, their thick fillets of composition heels like shiny mignon or rosy cross sections of pressed geology. At their shirts like Christmas ties.

    - The Franchiser

Read it out loud three times: the first to hear the sounds, the second to feel your mouth and tongue and throat make the sounds, the third time to listen to what Elkin is saying.