Slow Learner

One makes the amazing discovery that grown adults walking around with college educations, wearing khaki and brass and charged with heavy-duty responsibilities, can in fact be idiots. And that working-class white hats, while in theory capable of idiocy, are much more apt to display competence, courage, humanity, wisdom, and other virtues associated, by the educated classes, with themselves.

My mistake being to try to show off my ear before I had one.

I was operating on the motto "Make it literary," a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took.

My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon.

You may already know what a blow to the ego it can be to have to read over anything you wrote 20 years ago, even cancelled checks.

ISBN 978-1-101-59461-2