The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo...neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the processes That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail... Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed) Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in And out of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you were to ask me if I'd ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I'd have to say that I doubt it; where certain thing...s are concerned, I plan ahead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Smells of chestnuts in the streets, And female smells in shuttered rooms,... And cigarettes in corridors And cocktail smells in bars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When you are beginning, you will find you give better performances in the evening if you stay quiet during the day--no lunches, an...d certainly no cocktail parties. Remember you are overpaid, so take your money at the end of the week with as clear a conscience as you can.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back a...nd a mask on his face.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If, for some reason, you want to feel completely out of step with the rest of the world, the only thing to do is sit around a cock...tail lounge in the afternoon.... You sit around the gloom and have a few quiet, meditative drinks, get everything figured out. Then you go out and the sun hits you. And you feel like something that's been drinking in a gopher hole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe . . . taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, . . . and eating bran flakes . .... . and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I misremember who first was cruel enough to nurture the cocktail party into life. But perhaps it would be not too much too say, in... fact it would be not enough to say, that it was not worth the trouble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »