With coursework completed in Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Egyptology, Creative Writing, Ceramics, Behavioral Biology, and Archeology, it seems that I’ve created the perfect storm of over-education, thereby allowing me to figure out the ending to the show. This is not a joke. What Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry was to William Blake’s poetry, or John Irwin’s Doubling and Incest, [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Very Close Readings//’
January 27, 2010
The Lexicographical Legacy of Roseanne.
While writing my last Gent o’ Leis column, the very same one I’ve shamelessly hyperlinked here, I wanted to confirm that tobacconalian was the adjective form of tobacco. And so, I turned to your philological friend and mine, the Oxford English Dictionary, where I discovered the following citation for tobacco’s colloquial form, tobaccy:
1989 R. BARR Roseanne (1990) [...]
January 10, 2010
Fifty Words or Less// The New Yorker.
The January 11, 2009 New Yorker, in 50 of my words, 13 of their words:
Some people in Chicago were wrong about most everything; indeed, everyone wants everything but nobody fully understands Shakespeare; we won’t know anything about Justice Sotomayor until we know something about her; art stopped existing after February 22, 1987; and fiction containing the phrase, “By the [...]
November 24, 2009
Fifty Words or Less// The New Yorker.
The November 30, 2009 New Yorker, summarized in 35 words:
The distinctions between life and death, third-world political parties, and the genders do not exist as we know them—largely because of racism, though somewhat to do with sports named “football.” Story by Don Dellilo.
November 23, 2009
Comic Layering, via Marxes and Jackasses.
Comedy relies heavily on the layering principle, meaning that when you take one normal activity or object, and layer it with several more, the layers could potentially lead to a comical situation. A Marx Brothers film brought intrinsic comic layering, with at least three of the five siblings (Zeppo being optional, Gummo never appearing onscreen), [...]
November 20, 2009
A Few More Thoughts on Duck Soup.
Though I’ve already written about the Marx Brothers’ 1935 film Duck Soup, I was re-watching it last week, and realized that, of all the Marx Brothers films, this one might be the closest they came to celluloid perfection. Though some may point to A Night at the Opera as being the Marx Brothers’ best film [...]
October 26, 2009
Intro-spectography in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.
The use of color in landscape and setting is a curious, dangerous, oftentimes inaccurate tool. When used incorrectly, these passages read like one of those kiddy menus they hand out at restaurants — sloppily crayoned in by a four-year-old, gummed at the edges, and smattered with marinara sauce. Let me be clear that by no means [...]
October 20, 2009
A Good Lack in a Landscape.
From Eudora Welty’s “Worn Path“:
It was December — a bright frozen day in the early morning.
This morning, I’m looking at the beginning sentence of “A Worn Path” because of its lack of specificity (in O’Connor-speak, its mysteries and manners). Note how the only specific elements mentioned are that it’s December, and it’s morning. Elements that aren’t given:
The [...]
June 19, 2009
A Lovely Postcard regarding Orchids.
Several months ago, I wrote Susan Orleans (author of The Orchid Thief, whom Meryl Streep portrayed in the book’s film adaptation Adaptation) a brief note, asking her if she had ever encountered the man who bred the Brassocattleya “Mt. Hood Mary”, a very rare orchid (picture above) that I mentioned in a holiday essay about [...]
May 27, 2009
86 Reasons, in the first Two Paragraphs, as to why I couldn’t read The DWP (_evil _ears _rada).
Over the years, more than a few friends have asked me what I thought of The DWP (Ed Note: I’ve decided to use the first initials of any books whose authors earned enough advance money, 1. to hire very large people who could inflict bodily harm upon my person, and, 2. to not suffer any [...]
May 13, 2009
Footnote 51 of Aristotle’s Poetics. Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck.
Ever wonder why Aristotle’s Poetics spends 25 sections detailing all that is dramatic, but only two small paragraphs on comedy? It just so happens that I found the very reason, in Footnote 51 of the 1982 Gerald F. Else translation I picked up at the Strand:
May 4, 2009
38 Comments in Nine Sentences, from Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”.
Since I first read her work in a Landscape and Setting class I took in college, Flannery O’Connor has been one of my favorite writers, and her short-story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is something near divine perfection. I’ve recently started reading Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life, so I thought I’d return to the [...]
April 25, 2009
Great Books, Half Read.
Welcome to Great Books, Half Read. May I say, from the get-go, that I’m embarking upon this enterprise half-heartedly. It sort of reminds me of when parents ask their children, “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?”
A professor of Near Eastern Studies once told me that the invention of [...]
