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Show Acting Alone Page 385 of Commercialism, to the certain ritual death of popular recognition- but also the old man proceeded with determination in his fine old heavily-lidded Semitic eyes, as with unshakable faith in Sammy/Isaac's integrity and, barring that, talent. It was almost as though the Edwine boy's talent itself were the imperious, jealous Old Testament God, demanding recognition, commanding sacrifice, and Agent Cicerone were merely the altarB or perhaps the stone knife. At first glance the "creative thesis" seemed predictably steamy, appropriately manic, jumpy and miserable somewhere deep. It seemed the boy could've been a staffwriter on a more or less literate version of the National Enquirer, if such a thing can be imagined. The pages bristled with hundreds of wonderfully prejudicial things for Nimrod, Jr.'s dossier. Gradually, as he sat there in the soft Venetian blind-striped light of the editorial office of the Kansas Review of the Collective Humanities, the old Jew reading over his shoulder, their two nearly identical shades of white hair commingling, both men occasionally chuckling (for different reasons), gradually the Elder, this old-generation church boy, began to change inside. He found himself becoming mesmerized by the unrelenting seaminess and not-entirely-affected nihilism of the boy's language and metaphor. A new level of imaginable savagery began to insinuate itself into his consciousness. There was one digression in particular (these university writers, bored with cause and effect, abandon plot and character and setting, and so write proudly in pure digression from one non-existent centerpoint to another) that brought heaving up to his brain a sick type of intoxication. This |