Visser - The Way We Are
Here you can read online Visser - The Way We Are full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 1994;2014, publisher: HarperCollins Canada, genre: Home and family. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
![No cover](/templates/la/images/nocover.jpg)
- Book:The Way We Are
- Author:
- Publisher:HarperCollins Canada
- Genre:
- Year:1994;2014
- Rating:3 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
- 60
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
The Way We Are: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Way We Are" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Visser: author's other books
Who wrote The Way We Are? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
The Way We Are — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Way We Are" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
MARGARET
VISSER
THE WAY WE ARE
For my sister Joan
and in memory of Tony Vorkink (19211994)
visor or vizor (vaiz) n. a piece of armour fixed or hinged to the helmet to protect the face and furnished with slits for the eyes. another name for peak (on a cap). a small movable screen used as protection against glare from the sun. [C14: from Anglo-French viser, from Old French visire, from vis face; see VISAGE]visored or vizoredadj.visorless or vizorlessadj.
visserism (visrizm) n. a concise socio-anthropological insight arrived at by comparing current human behaviour with various alternative models, e.g., classical Graeco-Roman, Martian, etc. an entertainment in which points are made by identifying and skewering absurdities. any observation, esp. on contemporary manners, that provokes shocked laughter; a sly dig. Archaic or literary. the doctrine that all scholarship, e.g., food chemistry, etymology, particle physics, etc., exists to prove that life is rich, funny, and meaningful. [C20: from AngloSouth African-French visser to secure firmly or to screw in]visseriananounvisseredadj.visseraladj.
vista (Vist) n. a view, esp. through a long narrow avenue of trees, buildings, etc., or such a passage or avenue itself; prospect: a vista of arches. a comprehensive mental view of a distant time or a lengthy series of events: the vista of the future [C17: from Italian: a view from vedere to see, from Latin videre]vistaedadj.vistalessadj.
If visserism has not yet taken its rightful place in the dictionary, it is only because lexicographers are, as usual, slow to recognize the imperatives of everyday speech. At Saturday Night magazine, we cant claim to have coined the word (there are earlier citations in the archives of CBCs Morningside, in the literature of gastronomy, and in the records of the Classics Department at the University of Toronto), but it has certainly become indispensable around our offices. For example: Theres a topic ripe for visserism. Or: You should be vissered for that. And: Could he make it more visseral? Weve been saying things like that for the past six years.
It was in May 1988 that Margaret Vissers unique column, The Way We Are, started to adorn the pages of Saturday Night. It was quickly evident to our readers that here was not just a piquant writer but a genuinely original thinker, someone with her own slant on the world around us. Thats not surprising if you know her. Her great trick is to regard everything, absolutely everything on which her attention alights, as exotic.
The typical experience in reading a Visser column is to start off from a comfy, well-bolstered positiona nice tan makes us look healthier, for example, or Valentines Day cards are tackyand then, before we even have our seat-belts fastened, find ourselves whisked away in a series of brisk paragraphs through historical contexts and cultural cross-references to a destination that is neither comfy nor commonplace.
I will never forget the morning Margaret Vissers column on Santa Claus turned up on my desk in advance of a Christmas issue. Santa Claus! I groaned. What in heavens name is there left to sayone way or anotherabout Santa Claus? By the time I got to the end of the column I was sweating. A sex symbol? A spermatic journey down the shaft of a fireplace chimney? Our Santa Claus? Ever since, I have been conscious of the impulse to distract the eyes of my impressionable children from their iconography of Jolly Old St Nick. It just doesnt seem decent any more.
It has been much the same with her columns on high heels, broad beans, bathing suits, and the never-before-imagined possibilities offered by umbrellas. Margaret Visser has found gold in jelly, knitting, kissing, restaurant menus, stripes, the taste of sour, our failure to remember peoples namesall the familiar bric--brac of our daily lives. But far more important than merely pinpointing the curiosities with which we surround ourselves, she has always found a way to relate to our queer behaviours and assumptions to our shared humanity. Margaret Visser is no cool, detatched observer, but a warm and gleeful participant.
I once found myself on a subway train in Toronto sitting beside a younger reader of Saturday Night (our range is between ten and ninety-five) who was flipping through the pages. She was just browsing, looking at the pictures in the longer features and spending altogether too much time on the advertisement for Bermuda. (It was in the middle of winter.) Then, briefly, she took in Margaret Vissers column, flipped a few more pages and then turned back to the column. In this issue, it was on the history and moral significance of blue jeans. The reader herself was wearing blue jeans. At one point while she was into the thick of the column, she actually pinched the fabric of her own clothing to get a tactile fix on its texture. At the end, she let out a little Hmmm.
More hmmms have been uttered at the end of a Visser column, I suspect, than after anything else published in the magazine. They are provoked by her very visserism. Or, to be precise, they are properly called visseral hmmms.
J OHN F RASER
Editor
Saturday Night
March 1994
F resh off the boat from England in August 1964, we went into our first North American restaurant and ordered a hamburger. We had planned this event in advanceit was to be our first direct contact with the reality behind images we had known through movies, through television, through novels, through myth and fantasy, desire and suspicion and dread. We sat at a chrome-legged table with a red vinyl top, next to a smeary window. The waiter had come and gone, and had understood every word we said. It was very hot; enormous cars drifted past in the street. So far, so good. We could handle this. We were not surprised to be given glasses of water with ice in them, almost as soon as we sat down. We were delighted; this was what we had been told would happen in New York, and it had happened.
The hamburger came, and with it a plastic squeeze bottle full of tomato ketchup. Less delightful, but also to be expected. I decided I would prefer mustard, and asked for some. About a minute later, the air moved slightly near my cheek, and there was a light thump as a packet of mustard hit the tabletop. After a moments panic I turned, but the waiter was already gone, out of our ambit. The mustard lay, yellow in its transparent covering, on the table between us. It was an individual serving, just for me and not for Colin, who had not asked for any. The packet was soft and cool; the mustard was ready mixed. You were expected to tear the packet open and squeeze the mustard out with your fingersbut I could not bring myself to do that yet. We sat and looked at the mustard missile, and knew that we had reached a foreign place, an unpredictable and infinitely weird environment, which we had not come from, and into which we would slot ourselves only eventually and with the utmost difficulty. That packet of mustard was my introduction to North America.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
Similar books «The Way We Are»
Look at similar books to The Way We Are. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Discussion, reviews of the book The Way We Are and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.