LEND ME YOUR EAR: NEW YORKER CLEANEST AMONG `SLICKS'

Some of the most diverting and diverse writing in the country appears regularly in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town. The first full-scale feature in the magazine, it consists of commentaries on topics having little to do with each other, but everything to do with goings-on in the Big Apple, the nation, and the human condition.

Following are excerpts from a single recent issue, beginning with the opening sentence of the first section, titled Notes and Comment:

"The great public scandals of the last decade are remarkable above all, for their inconclusiveness, their strange resistance to closure ....

"Change would require self-scrutinizing ... It's much more convenient to reduce our political crises to the evil deeds of a few isolated figures ... and to confine reform to the task of putting away the latest crop of villains a never-ending task that merely punctuates our scandals rather than resolves them."

Meaty as well as succinctly-phrased.

In lighter vein, the second section is titled Star, the Star being an elephant that has appeared in movies:

"Flora Baldini is an African elephant with a resume ... As elephants go, Flora ... is positively photogenic. Her head is small in proportion to her body, and her leafy ears are exceptionally large and give her the look of a fashion model with long, teased hair ....

"Now, Flora hates Bert ... Tony hates Bert, and he really hates Flora. In St. Louis, the first time Tony escaped he got into Flora's pen, and suddenly I saw him flying through the air. He'll attack her. He doesn't have any teeth, but sometimes you can see him savagely gumming Flora's ankles ... It's a mutual hate relationship ...."

Nothing poetic here, but excellent picturing.

Next, we read of the final day of the U.S. Open at Flushing Meadow, titled simply Final:

"We arrived at the Open at the conclusion of the women's doubles, beneath a roof of clouds. As we settled into our seats, below us on the court, Martina and Gigi ... held up their silver bowl for the many camera people. Martina, cradling a spray of flowers like a ballerina, signed autographs on her way out. A few minutes later, an 11-year-old boy named David Schwartz turned up in our section with Martina's headband, and told us the strategy he'd used to get it ... he had barrelled up and cried, Martina! Great Game! Can I have your headband? ... We all looked at it and felt the cloth. It was surprising: pristine, silky, and not at all sweaty as if Martina, instead of smashing her way to her 31st Grand Slam doubles championship, had been, like us, just sitting around and downing Coney Island dogs with kraut."

Of Don Budge, whose plaque commemorated his 1938 Grand Slam, we read: "Don has fascinating sculpted bronze hair, each wavy strand in place; smallish teeth, with interesting definitional spaces between them ... He looked like a shy, slight, nice second cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis ... A man said to the back of his wife's hair, "O.K. Now. Muscle ahead ....

"True fandom in practice seems to mean maniacal attention to detail and, at its peak moments, a trance state bordering on artistic coma."

Fandom, a made-up word, obviously refers to a crowd or kingdom of fans.

The fourth and final section of The Talk of the Town is titled Opening, and refers to the grand opening of a new department store:

"Nordstrom is a fancy department-store chain ... that makes retailing an event rather than just retailing ... Nordstrom's is doughnut-shaped, the hole of the doughnut being a huge atrium and the rest of the doughnut being three circulated floors decorated in mutual colors. A large escalator zigzags up the atrium and affords a view of the piano ... We drove around for 10 minutes, stalking departing customers, and finally latched on to a woman in a flowered shift who looked shopped out."

These samples have been selected at random, but if you think this was an easy column to write, consider how much reading I did before deciding The Talk of the Town was worth a column.

The New Yorker is now being advertised as "possibly the best magazine in the world." Among the top-flight slicks of my acquaintance, it is also by far the cleanest and typos and printers' errors are mercifully rare.