Mary Norris

He had known Kerouac and Ginsberg at Columbia, and after a drink or two he would start saying things like “Dig it, man.”

Also on her desk was a canister, with a perforated lid, about the size of a shaker for red-pepper flakes in a pizzeria, wrapped in brown paper, on which she had drawn commas and the words “Comma Shaker.” This was Lu’s comment on The New Yorker’s “close” style of punctuation: she thought we used too many commas.