I could have been shot

or at least badly reviewed, for collapsing in hysterical laughter in my seat on a subway train when I read this in the New Yorker.

But I can’t think of any passage of comic prose where the tone is more perfectly pitched than here: “In his personal life, Auden was Peck’s Bad Boy, in and out of trouble with the law. His sad, gentle eyes and seamed face gave no indication of the trouble in store if you messed with him. His mother, who supported him throughout his career, always said that the literary rivals Auden shot would have done the same to him if he had given them the chance. Certainly, there was some truth in that. Auden himself blamed his legal difficulties on his fame, and on minor poets and other scribblers who wanted to hang out with him and whom he didn’t even know. When a dispute over the acceptability of an off-rhyme led to gunplay, Auden was always the one authorities came looking for.”

It’s not just the intrinsic delight of the subject matter, but the contrast in tone between the, melancholy falling cadence of the prose with a story normally told in aggressively chromed self-pity.

I want an audiobook of Garrison Keillor reading Tupac Shakur.