#s. j. perelman

[withnailrules]

I don't know where we're going or how we'll get there, but when we get there we'll be there - and that's something, even if it's nothing.

S. J. Perelman

[academic-vampire]

(Below is an essay I wrote about an essay I read concerning humans and technology. I titled it, “The De-Evolution of Man.” I think the topic is quite interesting to ponder. Keep in mind, the essay I am referring to (“Insert Flap ‘A’ and Throw Away” by S. J. Perelman) was written in the 1940s—it’s fascinating to see how society has changed, but even more compelling to see how society has stayed the same. What are your thoughts on the matter?)

The De-Evolution of Man

(Jack C, 2024)

S. J. Perelman’s essay, “Insert Flap ‘A’ and Throw Away,” explores humanity’s seemingly de-evolutioned self through satire and humor. Perelman’s essay follows a narrator who has terrible competency regarding “advanced”—assembly required—products. The author appears to relay his worst experiences dealing with infuriating technology, which society would consider advanced. Perelman raises the question of which person is truly evolving backward: those who can adapt to technology or those who cannot.

Perelman cleverly weaves satire throughout his essay while addressing the issue of modern technology. Humor allows Perelman to critique society and its supposed “advancements” when it comes to technology without his essay coming off as one long complaint. Satire and humor are practical tools for style and allow the writer to convey their message discreetly and entertainingly.

While the argument may not be directly stated, there seems to be an underlying theme of man versus modern technological “advancements.” More specifically, Perelman looks at how man appears to “decline in evolution” when presented with what society would deem “modern advancements.” The narrator becomes useless when confronted with these “buyer assembly required” products—stapling his thumb and slicing his finger open. It is common nowadays to buy furniture and have it shipped in parts for the buyer to assemble. Society claims that this symbolizes progress, but it may only be considered progress due to the lessening cost of the product, not the effectiveness of it. A pre-made dresser costs significantly more than one the buyer needs to assemble themselves. In that, the buyer is put to the test, and like Perelman’s narrator, sometimes the buyer fails technology.

Perelman’s narrator does not advance as a human while he tries to build the two products; instead, he de-evolves. This attempt to overpower the technology can be seen when the narrator determines to, “…show them who was master…”, referring to his family and maybe even society (189). By attempting to master this “advanced” technology, the narrator strives to evolve. But after a battle with the products, the narrator fails the test of evolution in terms of ability and states, “‘There,’ I said with a gasp, ‘that’s close enough…’” (189). The narrator cannot rise to the challenge of progress and, therefore, declines into a creature of helplessness and incompetence.

Whether or not modern technology can be considered advanced or impractical is up for debate. Perhaps if one had the skill to handle these advancements, they would not have as much trouble as the narrator had. That begs the question, which person embodies de-evolution—the person who can adapt to modern ways or the person who cannot? Perelman seems to convey that technology is the thing that is moving backward in terms of progress, not humans. The attempt to assemble the impractical product renders the narrator animalistic, but progress would claim that the obsoleteness of man is technology’s core purpose.

Works Cited

Atwan, Robert, and Joyce Carol Oates. The Best

American Essays of the Century. Houghton

Mifflin Co., 2000.

[edgarmoser]

the rising gorge by s. j. perelman

[nine-frames]

"This is some football game, and I wish you were here. In fact, I wish you were here instead of me."

Horse Feathers, 1932.

Dir. Norman Z. McLeod | Writ. Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, S. J. Perelman & Will B. Johnstone | DOP Ray June

[barkingbonzo]

Ava Gardner, One Touch of Venus, 1948

One Touch of Venus is a 1948 American black-and-white romantic musical comedy film directed by William A. Seiter starring Robert Walker, Ava Gardner, Dick Haymes, and Eve Arden. released by Universal-International, and based on the 1943 Broadway musical of the same name, book written by S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash, with music composed by Kurt Weill (lyrics by Nash)

[docnad]

A postcard from #SJPerelman in Italy

S. J. Perelman to Harvey Orkin and His Son Anthony https://attemptedbloggery.blogspot.com/2024/09/s-j-perelman-to-harvey-orkin-and-his.html #Postcard #HarveyOrkin

[alrederedmixedmedia]

Alredered Remembers S. J. Perelman, humour essayist and screenplay writer, on his birthday.

"Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin - it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring."

-S. J. Perelman

[davidhudson]

S. J. Perelman, February 1, 1904 – October 17, 1979.

[ebonetnoir]

The Rising Gorge by S. J. Perelman FIRST EDITION STATED FIRST PRINTING Publisher: Simon and Schuster, New York Copyright: 1961

$12 on ETSY 

[litlangislife]

The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere.

- S.J. Perelman

[ultraozzie3000]

Ten Cents In Stamps

Ten Cents In Stamps

Like E.B. White, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker who came before him, S. J. Perelman was one of those New Yorker writers whose name would become synonymous with the magazine. 

Jan. 24, 1931 cover by William Crawford Galbraith.

Perelman’s first New Yorkerarticle, “Ten Cents in Stamps,” appeared in the Jan. 24, 1931 issue, his subject a collection of self-help and “how to” books he introduced with…

[solo1y]

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it.

Groucho Marx To S. J. Perelman about his book Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge.

Possibly the second-best book review in history. 

Related: The best book review in history.

[oldschoolsciencefiction]

I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.

S. J. Perelman, "Captain Future, Block That Kick!," The New Yorker, 20 January 1940

[justforbooks]

The New Yorker is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Started as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans. Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside New York and is read internationally. It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers, its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric Americana, its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of short stories and literary reviews, its rigorous fact checking and copy editing, its journalism on politics and social issues, and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue.

The New Yorker was founded by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter, and debuted on February 21, 1925. Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine that would be different from perceivably "corny" humor publications such as Judge, where he had worked, or the old Life. Ross partnered with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann (who founded the General Baking Company) to establish the F-R Publishing Company. The magazine's first offices were at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan. Ross edited the magazine until his death in 1951. During the early, occasionally precarious years of its existence, the magazine prided itself on its cosmopolitan sophistication. Ross famously declared in a 1925 prospectus for the magazine: "It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque."

Although the magazine never lost its touches of humor, it soon established itself as a pre-eminent forum for serious fiction, essays and journalism. Shortly after the end of World War II, John Hersey's essay Hiroshima filled an entire issue. In subsequent decades the magazine published short stories by many of the most respected writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Ann Beattie, Sally Benson, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, Mavis Gallant, Geoffrey Hellman, Ruth McKenney, John McNulty, Joseph Mitchell, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Philip Roth, George Saunders, J. D. Salinger, Irwin Shaw, James Thurber, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Stephen King, and E. B. White. Publication of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" drew more mail than any other story in the magazine's history.

The New Yorker's signature display typeface, used for its nameplate and headlines and the masthead above The Talk of the Town section, is Irvin, named after its creator, the designer-illustrator Rea Irvin. The body text of all articles in The New Yorker is set in Adobe Caslon.

One uncommonly formal feature of the magazine's in-house style is the placement of diaeresis marks in words with repeating vowels—such as reëlected, preëminent, and coöperate—in which the two vowel letters indicate separate vowel sounds. The magazine also continues to use a few spellings that are otherwise little used in American English, such as fuelled, focussed, venders, teen-ager, traveller, marvellous, carrousel, and cannister.

The magazine also spells out the names of numerical amounts, such as "two million three hundred thousand dollars" instead of "$2.3 million", even for very large figures.

Despite its title, The New Yorker is read nationwide, with 53 percent of its circulation in the top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas. According to Mediamark Research Inc., the average age of The New Yorker reader in 2009 was 47 (compared to 43 in 1980 and 46 in 1990). The average household income of The New Yorker readers in 2009 was $109,877 (the average income in 1980 was $62,788 and the average income in 1990 was $70,233).

According to Pew Research, 77 percent of The New Yorker's audience hold left-of-center political values, while 52 percent of those readers hold "consistently liberal" political values.

The magazine's first cover illustration, a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle, was drawn by Rea Irvin, the magazine's first art editor, based on an 1834 caricature of the then Count d'Orsay which appeared as an illustration in the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The gentleman on the original cover, now referred to as "Eustace Tilley", is a character created by Corey Ford (1902–1969) for The New Yorker. The hero of a series entitled "The Making of a Magazine", which began on the inside front cover of the August 8 issue that first summer, Tilley was a younger man than the figure on the original cover. His top hat was of a newer style, without the curved brim. He wore a morning coat and striped formal trousers. Ford borrowed Eustace Tilley's last name from an aunt—he had always found it vaguely humorous. "Eustace" was selected by Ford for euphony.

The character has become a kind of mascot for The New Yorker, frequently appearing in its pages and on promotional materials. Traditionally, Rea Irvin's original Tilley cover illustration is used every year on the issue closest to the anniversary date of February 21, though on several occasions a newly drawn variation has been substituted.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[somehow-on]

Notes - 2020

Wiping your ass is next to godliness.

I'd throw a fat man in front of a train for you.

I'm alone in the center of the universe, everyone else is just increasingly complex epicycles.

Everyone plans to empathize until they're punched in the mouth.

I'm always on time, I'm a true punc.

Do I talk to myself? I do everything to myself.

Stay woc.

Nihilist in theory, pragmatist in practice.

Vectorian Grey.

H2650-1, J-bend, 1.25 inch. Compression Washer.

Full grown, adult sized, bangeroos.

How about instead of doing everything shittily all at once, you do one thing well?

Third Riech Feminist.

Lee Moses - she's a bad girl

If I'm going to die on a hill it's going to be frigging mount hillaminjarro.

Never compromise nor coordinate.

Dump sack.

Tracing paper.

Sex, the world's oldest commodity.

Arm Q's: infection vs bursitis, bone spur, IV soreness, basketball, drinking, elevation, some reason antibiotics aren't working

I'm no racist, I voted for Biden.

I'm not a socialist, I'm a social distancer.

I'm a Hooverist.

Other people's money.

Stop taking my chances.

Beautiful/fertile, ugly/sterile.

Get good at hitting your target, or get good at coming up with excuses for why you missed.

Life is for the risk tolerant.

Never regulated.

Sicker than sars-cov'ers, higher than Mars rovers.

60 Watt, 75 Watt

No one has a clearer vision of the absence of truth at the center of existence.

The meek and the brash.

I'm jewlatto.

Your amazing ability to invent clever new ways to be miserable.

Barry White - I'm gonna love you just a little more baby

Admiral Sissy Mary.

Imagine sisyphus getting prizes.

social darwining not distancing.

Wyatt Dykeman.

My life in bits.

You should see the other 7 billion.

Eyes are the windows of the cell.

The Heat of Composition.

The arrows of time.

It's not free will that is the illusion, physical cause and effect itself is illusory, all there is is brain chemicals and/or qualia.

My life as a trophy case to my disillusionments.

Theories on life list.

What is a superstition but an illusion of control?

This country's been in the toilet ever since we elected that Catholic Kennedy.

X is a religion, but not because it's a ethics, but because it's an explanation. Nothing can be explained.

What does the urkel tv show have to do with anything?

Was the most popular girl out behind the school. - 2013

puts the miscue in promisuous. - 2013

It doesn't bother me that people call me fat; I'm just thick-skinned. - 2012

Parezewsky, Mozca.

Vanguard Commodity Fund. VCMDX.

Gleeconomist.

I'm just a tall, hairy, little girl.

Diligence. Due diligence. Owed diligence.

Get yur kit off.

Smart as a button.

Sysiphus laughing.

Bluff the devil.

To sugar in our boogers and cream in our jeans.

The one inch of spacetime in front of my face.

The matrix but it's your own brain simulating your life one second at a time.

God gave his only son as a false flag operation.

Shitposting cannot be refuted, it can only be repeated. - TIB

Can't be arsed.

Breath spilled.

To me, every bumper sticker is basically a swastika. Tattoo.

S. J. Perelman. Mort Sahl. George S Kaufman.

Wide eyes nights late lying awake.

I just wish I could do less.

Meaningless, purposeless, alienating, novelty.

You don't have to hold so tightly to your ideas of how the world ought to be. If you relax just a little it's not going to fall apart. It will still keep getting a little better every day, and you'll have given yourself some room to enjoy what is good in it.

Ethically-Sourced Sadism.

Pathos-Aggresive.

The answer to every question is either everything or nothing.

People are always trying to help me find my wallet.

For a while I was living in my car dealership.

Avoid work, acquire orgasms.

The real reward is the silence and nothingness you make along the way.

Our relationship is purely physical, she's my aerobics instructor.

Pogo - Walt Kelly

Ameianto - super combo. Liniker

MMT is just communism with extra steps.

Crown of mud.

Don't count other people's status.

The emperor is fully clothed but is actually just a homeless weirdo off his meds.

Repeater.

Blackface is offensive, I only ever do African-American-face.

We must protect the children and coincidentally my social status.

Jeff Bezus Christ.

Born and bred and dipped in butter.

VMBSX - mortgage backed securities

Your son is going to grow up loving me, so who's the real cuck after all?

Avarice.

The dead infant is fulfilled. Baby coffin.

Chiaroscuro.

Data Based God.

Laugh while you burn.

Boredom is gravity always pulling you back to earth. Comedy is ramp that tricks your penchant for boredom in to launching you for a brief moment into the sky and closer to God.

Nihilists know the price of everything and the value of nothingness.

Acquisitive.

Speak less, smilf more.

The world is my cloister.

Breads Benedict.

Hose down, pimp up.

Health, wealth, and mirth. Birth, worth, and mirth.

London Fog.

I don't want to be in any club that wouldn't have me as their president.

Recognize the future.

You only do two weeks anyhow, the week you go in and the week you go out.

Use my time machine to go back and kill clippy before he is ever shipped.

It's not about the size of the boat, but the ocean of lotion.

The weight room is where we determine the proper weights for our pitch randomizer.

Failed Utopia. Utopia of the failed.

South of the wall.

Mektoub, my love. Movie.

She wants me to take her to the pound town county courthouse to apply for a liquor license, if you know what I mean.

I only do two things, break hearts and chew gum. And I'm delivered a monthly subscription of gum.

Beckett-head Wendy. Wundy.

I'm a consummate consumer.

Billy Joel: The father of hip hop.

Bask & wallow.

There's nothing to be done. I'll do on. Call that doing, call that on.

Hell and madness: trying to control that which you cannot.

Only reason anyone does anything: to make friends.

We are all united against the past, but in a war against all for the future.

Elena ferrante, the lost daughter.

Paul oster, hunt for herman miller.

Reality is plastic - hypnotism book

Fund the police! Coming straight from the underground.

My life's just a $10M bit.

There's a method to my badness.

Good fences make good neighborhoods.

Someone's gotta keep the bad world from the door.

Dom-text.

Isolate your favorites.

Huey Newton and the Lootings.

Too hasty by far!

Drinking my Soylent, doing my thang.

We only like the beginning of things.

Johnnie Ray.

Having sex astride a grave, the love gleams an instant and then it's dark once more.

Give us this day our daily death.

Live small & petite mort.

There's no small lives, just petite morts.

Gems in the mud.

Mud-miner.

I let you lose.

Air, water, food, hugs.

Shut up, show off.

Friendship is forever, romance is by the hour.

A shoulder to sigh on.

Pithetic. Inspires pith.

Everything is dim, inapparently.

Cum-dumptruck.

Mr. Smarty.

Moist with meaning.

Covid-wife.

Cuddle to completion.

I'm a very adorable pervert.

Still chasing my perfect compliment. Ultimate.

You don't pay me to be doing something all the time, you pay me to do the right thing at the right time, and to know what and when that is.

Melo-chromatic.

Go with Goethe. Go with Godot.

Off-black.

Peddling my piddling wares.

Godot waits for me.

Thick-stick thespian. Dipstick lesbian.

To want something is beautiful, to get it is obscene. Cloying. Nauseating.

I'm not smart enough to say little, I have to say a lot.

Papa Pill.

Pall.

Patience Zero. Seize the delay. It gets better, then worse.

Worrier-Princess. Golden State Worrier.

I'm looking for someone out of my league physically, intellectually, and morally; who I will try desperately to hide all my shortcomings and flaws from until one of us dies, hopefully me.

Greylord.

[davidhudson]

S. J. Perelman, February 1, 1904 – October 17, 1979.

1948 photo by John Vachon.