For Calvin Trillin, no life of crime to work in rhyme

CORNWALL, Conn. — Author and humorist Calvin Trillin spoke at a fundraiser for the Cornwall Library on Saturday, Dec. 1. Trillin’s talk was held at the First Congregational Church in Cornwall, followed by a social hour and book signing at the library.Trillin was introduced to the audience by Franny Taliaferro, Cornwall Library Board of Trustees member and personal friend of the author.Trillin has written about a wide variety of topics including food, history and politics. The audience responded with round after round of laughter to his humorous remarks.Trillin began by telling the audience, “I told Franny not to bother with a complicated introduction, just something simple like, ‘Not since Mark Twain …’.”He added, “Any writer is happy to be in a library or at a library event because it holds our pathetic grip on immortality. In bookstores, the shelf life of an American book is now, I’ve often said, somewhere between milk and yogurt. The books of Dan Brown and Danielle Steel have a longer shelf life, but they contain preservatives.”Trillin is a lifetime trustee of the New York Public Library. He recalled how, for a long time, the library would have fundraising dinners at private homes, sometimes with more than 100 different dinners on the same night. The hosts and hostesses would try to outdo one another in terms of lavishness. The brochures advertising these dinners might say, “An evening of dinner in the Court of Louis XIV with food flown in from France prepared by a famous chef.” Trillin said he, and his late wife, Alice, were once asked to host such a dinner in their Greenwich Village home. He told the library they could offer, “pretty decent Chinese take-out.”The author related how, some years ago, he took part in an Authors Guild gala where the entertainment was four or five people writing rejection letters to authors of famous works of literature. This was organized by Garrison Keillor, of NPR’s long-running Prairie Home Companion radio program. Keillor’s rejection letter was of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden.” Keillor’s fantasy rejection letter said, according to Trillin, “The axioms were interesting but the sentence structure was weak and I suggested turning it into a calendar.” Trillin said, “I rejected ‘The Wasteland’ by T.S. Eliot.“I sometimes think of Eliot and myself as the Missouri school of poetry, though we have our differences. I was born in Kansas City while he was from St. Louis.“When I was a boy, Kansas City was called the Gateway to the West. Then St. Louis built a $49 million arch and started calling itself the gateway. In Kansas City we think of St. Louis as the Exit from the East.”Speaking of the poet’s work, Trillin said, “He liked to use a lot of Sanskrit words in his works. I use Yiddish. T.S. Eliot was not partial to Yiddish.” In another comparison of his own work to Eliot’s, Trillin said, “He wrote about cats, I write about corgis. I once wrote in a column that corgis are a breed of dog assembled from parts of other breeds of dogs. And not the parts those other dogs were sorry about losing.”Trillin brought the house down with laughter as he read the shortest poem he ever wrote. It was titled “The Philosophical, Political and Societal Implications of the O.J. Simpson Trial.” “That is the title. The poem is: ‘O.J., oy vey.’”Trillin said it’s fun to write poems about politicians and rhyme their names. As an example, he said, “Former President George H.W. Bush’s last name rhymes with ‘tush’.”While speaking about poetry written by persons of certain professions, Trillin said, “Hedge fund poetry is interesting. For example, ‘He always bought the day before the rise, he always sold the day before the dive. They never knew the secret of his touch, and now they know he’s doing two to five.’”Trillin said he once wrote a poem titled, “A Bank Has Swallowed up the Bank That Swallowed up the Bank That Swallowed up my Bank.”Another of Trillin’s narrative poems is called “Callista Gingrich,” about the wife of former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich: “Aware that her husband has cheated on and left two seriously ill women, tries to make light of a bad cough.”The humorist referenced another poem called “The Female Reproductive System, a Lecture by Todd Akin,” the Missouri congressman who made headlines for his controversial views on rape and abortion.In the question-and-answer period following his talk, Trillin was asked about the famous barbecue restaurants in Kansas City. He talked about this happy subject for a while and mentioned that he would only eat at black-owned restaurants.“Going to a white barbecue in Kansas City is like going to a gentile internist.”In response to an audience question, he said he does not use the social media website Twitter. “Tweeting is hard for people like myself who write for a living. If you Tweet, who pays you?” He added that, “I like to stay three technologies behind.”At the social hour following his talk, which was held at the Cornwall Library, Trillin signed copies of his book, “Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin” and chatted with guests.