An Angel, a Flower, a Bird

New Yorker

I will quote the opening paragraph, even though it is long - it will give a taste of his writing.

I had been told that most people flying from New York to Austin, Texas, are apt to be en route to conferences with either legislators or professors (Austin being both the state capital and the seat of the state university), and that my mission—to talk with a gentleman who had rocked the international vaudeville world in the nineteen-twenties and thirties with a trapeze act he did disguised as a girl, to the music of Wagner and Rimski-Korsakov—would not, even though he was Texas-born, be considered by Texans a sufficiently serious reason for visiting their state. I suspected at the time that my informant was not entirely correct, and my suspicion has since been confirmed. In Texas, there are quite a few vaudeville buffs, I have discovered, who are respectfully knowledgeable about the career of Barbette (as the gentleman I had come to see was known professionally). And Since Barbette is the hero of one of the best essays on the nature of art written by Jean Cocteau, the French poet, novelist, dramatist, draftsman, and cineaste—an essay not unknown in university circles—his name enjoys, thanks to that connection, academic prestige at Austin as well as elsewhere. It is true, however, that although some of those admirers knew that Barbette was Texas-born, it was generally unknown that he had returned to the state and was living in Austin.

There is something else that draws visitors to Austin - it is an active part of the software ecosystem. And many software conferences are held there - something software developers must do frequently to see and be seen - and to see where they stand in that highly competitive, fast-changing power structure.

But I must return to Literature, and Cocteau, of whom I know nothing. And Francis Steegmuller, of whom I know nothing either. And of the French, of which I am as ignorant, as the Hottentots. 

I am from the American Midwest - from a remote part of America, that is itself remote. 

I did download The Holy Terrors and I am reading it. I should not being enjoying it - but in a perverse way, I am.