To this day, because of that damned history-making, barrierbreaking piece of fiction, I can't look at a soup tureen, a grandfather clock, or a Crayola crayon without sporting an erection, bursting into tears, and wanting to either paint my fingernails black or firebomb Dresden. If I risked reading that collection in public now, I'm sure I'd have to fend off all sorts of pesky questions, like "Was that Steve Bannon's winning game plan for Wisconsin?" Some years later, when I assigned Oldest Living Confederate Widow in a class entitled "Imagining the Civil War," students rebelled. ...there was no "we of me" that night, and you owe me thirteen euros, Mr. Gurganus. ...there's my humor class, a survey of US comic writing that begins with three weeks of humor theory.