"C M Kornbluth - Ms Found In A Chinese Fortune Cookie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

On Monday afternoon the paper woman drove past our place and shot the rolled-up copy of the Pott
Hill Evening Times into the orange-painted tube beside our mailbox. I raced for it, yanked it open to the
seventh page and read:

FARMSALE

Owing to 111 Health and Age Mr. & Mrs. Ronald Clonford Will sell their Entire Farm, All Machinery
and Furnishings and All Live Stock at Auction Saturday May 1912:30 P.M.Rain or Shine, Terms Cash
Day of Sale, George Pfennig,

Auctioneer.

[This is one of the few things in the Corwin Papers which can be independently verified. I looked up the
paper and found that the ad was run about as quoted. Further,

I interviewed Mrs. Clonford in her town apartment. She told me she "just got tired of farmin', / guess.
Kind of hated to give up my ponies, but people was beginning to say it was too hard of a life for Ronnie
and I guess they was right." CMK]

Coincidence? Perhaps. I went upstairs with the paper and put my feet up again. I could try a hundred
more piddling tests if I wished, but why waste time? If there was anything to it, I could type out The
Answer in about two hundred words, drive to town, tack it on the bulletin board outside the firehouse
and-snowball. Avalanche!

I didn't do it, of course-for the same reason I haven't put down the two hundred words of The Answer
yet on a couple of these cigarette papers. It's rather dreadful- isn't it-that I haven't done so, that a simple
feasible plan to ensure peace, progress and equality of opportunity among all mankind, may be lost to the
world if, say, a big meteorite hits the asylum in the next couple of minutes. But-I'm a writer. There's a
touch of intellectual sadism in us. We like to dominate the reader as a matador dominates the bull; we like
to tease and mystify and at last show what great souls we are by generously flipping up the shade and
letting the sunshine in. Don't worry. Read on. You will come to The Answer in the proper artistic place
for it. [At this point I wish fervently to dissociate myself from the attitudes Corwin attributes to our
profession. He had-has, I hope-his eccentricities, and I consider it inexcusable of him to tar us all with his
personal brush. I could point out, for example, that he once laboriously cultivated a 16th Century
handwriting which was utterly illegible to the modern reader. The only reason apparent for this, as for so
many of his traits, seemed to be a wish to annoy as many people as possible. CMK]

Yes; I am a writer. A matador does not show up in the bull ring with a tommy gun and a writer doesn't
do things the simple, direct way. He makes the people writhe a little first. So I called Fred Greenwald.
Fred had been after me for a while to speak at one of the Thursday Rotary meet-

ings and I'd been reluctant to set a date. I have a little speech for such occasions, "The Business of Being
a Writer"-all about the archaic royalty system of payment, the difficulty of proving business expenses, the
Margaret Mitchell tax law and how it badly needs improvement, what copyright is and isn't. I pass a few
galley sheets down the table and generally get a good laugh by holding up a Doubleday book contract,
silently turning it over so they can see how the fine print goes on and on, and then flipping it open so they
see there's twice as much fine print as they thought there was. I had done my stuff for Oswego Rotary,
Horseheads Rotary and Cannon Hole Rotary; now Fred wanted me to do it for Painted Post Rotary.