`A Bowl of Mush'

I love Chicago but have never been a Studs Terkel fan -- too folksy. Fortunately, the wonderful Richard G. Stern has written a beautiful sendoff for his old friend, worth reading if only for its generous expression of affection. And for this:

"Back in the Fifties, I didn’t think much of Studs. A culture snob, I didn’t think much of Brahms and delighted in such mots as Stravinsky’s `Wagner is the Puccini of music.' I championed such writers as J. F. Powers, Peter Taylor, and the Bellow of Seize the Day (Augie March seemed back then too loose-jointed for me), along with Proust, Joyce, and what Ezra Pound called `the Rooshans.' So Studs, who daily `interrupted' the music on WFMT, was for me a bowl of mush. nce, he came up to a round-table discussion at the University of Chicago, and I thought I’d never heard a gabber who couldn’t locate a verb to pin down his adverbial clauses."

Stern's half-century-old tastes and prejudices are almost precisely mine today.