Read My Clips: Media Person Cuts Up

Media Person was created for 7 Days magazine in 1989. The periodical has died but MP lives on in this outstanding collection of columns by his creator, Grossberger ( The Non-Runners Book ). MP is a New Yorker who never leaves his apartment, subsisting on TV, radio, and newspapers and magazines that are sent in. His view of the universe is expressed with a world-weary, jaundiced sense of humor, but beneath the saturnine smile lurks a devastating critic. His topics include tabloid fundamentalism, which finds God involved in every plane crash without fatalities and consigns every dead notable to either heaven (Billy Martin) or hell (the Ayatollah Khomeini); faux French, which comes out of the textbook and barely resembles the Gallic population's impenetrable idiom and slang; and newspaper cliches, which may be words, ideas or even photographs, like that of an egg frying on the sidewalk. ( June )