Comment by Garrison Keillor. A friend in the Middle West writes: My 15-year-old son has just returned from abroad with a dozen rolls of exposed film and a hundred dollars in uncashed travellers' checks, and is asleep at the moment. Last night he slept in Paris and the twenty nights before that...

The Talk of the Town Socks by William McKibben. Talk story about Thor-Lo Padds, a new kind of sock from the Thorneburg Hosiery Company. Writer attended a breakfast at the Vertical Club with Jim Thorneburg, the sock manufacturer. The new socks are athletic in style, and the heel and toe have added sock density -- padding, you could say...

Profiles THE SPACE AROUND REAL THINGS by Calvin Tomkins. PROFILE of abstract painter Frank Stella, who many consider one of the most important living artists. His work has never really appealed to a large public & his private life has remained private. Somehow, though, Stella's career has become a kind of guarantee of the integrity of the whole...

A Political Journal by Elizabeth Drew. The Republican Convention met in Dallas beginning August 20. Though President Reagan's advisers worry about overconfidence even the most cautious find it hard to see how he could lose. He is a political phenomenon--a man who by force of personality and marvellous stage management superimposes himself over his party...

Books by John Updike.

Musical Events by Andrew Porter.

The Talk of the Town Factory by Alec Wilkinson. Talk story about a business called Archaeon, located at 38 East Thirtieth St., which makes the tools necessary for field study in the disciplines of archeology and paleontology. It is a subsidiary of Sculpture House, which has made sculpture tools since 1918. It was originally called Ettl Studios, as it...

Fiction On the Zattere by William Trevor. Six months after her mother's death Verity gave up her flat and moved in with her father, ostensibly in concern for his loneliness. She was thirty-eight and had recently come to believe that life was passing her by. Love-making had been too easy in her convenient flat, and...

Fiction In One Place by Judy Troy. Wynn and Annalee live next door to each other in the Real-West Mobile Home Park on the edge of town. They both work at J&S Tavern on the other side of the highway. Wynn is fifty-four and Annalee is twenty-four. This afternoon they work together...

The Talk of the Town Laughs by Stanley Mieses. Talk story about Carroll Pratt, who owns and operates a patented laugh-track machine that is used on many television situation comedies and variety shows. For 26 years he has been, in the jargon of the trade "sweetening" live--television-audience soundtracks--or "relaughing" them. Bill Persky, director of the...

Poetry More Music by Carl Dennis. This one thinks he's lucky when his car/Flips over in the...