This would have been a lot funnier if the last sentence read, "... but would be assassins take note: Abraham Lincoln is already dead."
What publication was that in, Becks?
That's appalling in ways I can barely even comprehend.
His escape was heard because he jumped onstage and yelled at the audience!
Otherwise, as finely deployed an inappropriate reference to the death of a beloved President as I have seen in the theater press.
Between this and Mona's post discussed downblog, do we need a Godwin's law for Lincoln references?
Semicomedy?
I ask because I personally know a theater reviewer who might have been capable of writing such lines. A wonderful person, in many ways, product of the best schools and a writing teacher at one of 'em...
Semicomedy?
It's like 2 percent funny.
Is the reviewer trying to insinuate that Our Leading Lady is a funny, funny play? I can't quite make it out.
It's not so much what is said as how it's said. Little bits of awkward thrown into a bad rhythm. I don't know how something like that is prevented.
Maybe it's just a tired person trying too hard.
It's the whole abbreviated, recherché style that bugs me: three super-compressed lines of barely relevant or irrelevant factoids in search of a one-liner that isn't funny but witty---or could be considered witty, I guess, if you gave a fuck. (The person I was afraid this was going to be is totally guilty of this. I've watched this person twist around an entire review to get in a cherished one-liner in.)
So, just to put this in perspective, it's in Time Out.
I'm not sure what Adam's insinuating, but I'd argue that TONY's theater coverage stands up pretty well to anyone's. Their two staffers, David Cote (who, granted, is responsible for this) & Adam Feldman, are really quite knowledgeable, as good as any younger critics in town, they get more space than, say, the Voice, New York, or the New Yorker, and they're better at covering downtown than the Times. On the other hand (& maybe this was the point), they do have to push the kind of arch knowingness that cripples, in different ways, both Gawker and n+1.
Also, note that the play itself is ABOUT Our American Cousin, so the reference is much less gratuitous than it might otherwise appear.
Are you thinking of Flannery O'Conner? To the question "do creating writing programs throttle young writers", she is supposed to have said "they don't throttle enough of them."
many opportunities to muffle your guns
more euphemisms.
I've watched this person twist around an entire review to get in a cherished one-liner in.
This is not only a plague in critical writing, but in journalism generally. I swear, a significant portion of the kind of distortions that Bob Somerby goes on about can be attributed to the press' inability to resist a pun.
If it lost the cute "decider-in-chief" bit, chosen a real word instead of "semicomedy", and had been an insult instead of a plaudit, and edited for rhythm it would have been pretty good.
If the reviewer had lept onto the stage in the middle of the performance and shouted, "Sic semper tyrannis! Are you with me, people?" it would have been awesome.
"Cyril Connolly?"
"No... semicomedy."
"Ohhhh."
I think V.S. Naipaul made a point of discouraging his students from writing, but that may just have been racism. Robert Graves wrote a poem in praise of the Man from Porlock.
cerebrocrat (that's a lot of Rs) set up his/her point beautifully - after reading the first sentence, I immediately thought of examples from Somerby, without realizing that was exactly where it was going.
Sorry I don't know the gender of cerebrocrat.
But I thought all actors (or is that bloggers) were assassins? BTW, the Players Club on the south side of Gramercy Park (NYC) was once, I believe, the Booth residence.
11: First lesson for a clever/witty person trying to write for publication is recognizing that neither wit nor cleverness translate well on the page - they both rely too much on timing - making the comment at the relevant moment. To do this in writing, you need to recreate the moment, and that rarely works; even when it does, it's rarely worth the effort.
I'm very fortunate, in that I co-write restaurant reviews with my wife, who happily stifles my own urges to be clever or witty. Maybe once a year I think she's taken out something worthwhile (although slightly more often than that I think she should've been a little more excisive).
more often than that I think she should've been a little more excisive
Be careful what you wish for.
Adam Feldman
This guy was literally so horrified and insulted by the mere notion of attractive Nazi kids singing pop music that he left in the middle of the first act of White Noise (this was for the festival production). He told us later that TONY would have to send someone else, since our show had so thoroughly offended his delicate sensibilities that he couldn't be expected to write objectively about it.
I mean, honestly. It's just a fucking musical. Not actually that dangerous, dude. They're just actors on a stage.
Eoj - By the way, can I just say that every week as I'm getting ready for my first day of work, I get "I Hate Mondays" in my head and cringe. Damn, that's a catchy song.
(I don't cringe for having the song in my head; I cringe because of the context. "Lazy Mondays". Oy.)
Yeah! Nazi pop will eat your branes.
28: Wow, I can only imagine how biased the TONY voters were against such puerile offenses to decency as "The Producers" and "Cabaret".
Um, scratch that, I failed to recognize that "Tony" meant "Time Out New York" rather than "Tony".
But still, it's not like the play was about a woman who constantly farts and then sleeps with God and dumps him or something.
I hadn't known that Eoj was a Nazi.
Holbo grumbled when I called Sausagely a Nazi, too, but you know, Godwin's Law has been played. I think that Unfogged should give Eoj a platform to explain his Nazi views, so we don't just condemn tham mindlessly.
"explain" s/b "sing and perform an interpretive dance of"
35 - But others will do this for me, and eight times a week.
I should have kept on top of this, but wasn't there going to be another opportunity to see esioN etihW, eoJ? This spring?
Knowing me I missed it.
What's your technique for mirror typing? I'd have to type the word frontwords, then touch-type it backwards, then erase the first.
No technique - it's a little slower than spelling drawrof, fo esruoc. But I used to amuse myself in Latin class by writing out poetry in mirror image with my left hand, so I built up some practice.
39. Pretty cool, Leonardo.
If you saw my handwriting, you wouldn't call me that. Backward or forward, my script looks like a demented chicken stepped in ink and was then chased across the page.
Backward or forward, my script looks like a demented chicken stepped in ink and was then chased across the page.
She is not exagerating. When we worked together and LizardBreath would give me comments on stuff, my first reaction was wondering why an eight-year-old with penmanship problems was commenting on my stuff. Brilliant substantively, but pretty rough looking.
I beat out a lot of people with terrible handwriting on legibility, though -- it's not the typical trying-to-glean-information-from-an-irregularly-wavy-line problem. It just looks as though I'm recovering from a traumatic brain injury.
I realized recently that I can't read my own signature anymore. I mean, I recognize it as my signature, but if I ever forgot my name I don't think I could figure out what it was by looking at something I'd signed.
And I thought we'd established in the voyeurism thread that I hadn't been commenting on your stuff.
44: Me too. You can actually still read the part of my last name that's Buck's -- I've only been signing that for ten years, so it's not worn down to a scribble yet. But my first and my half of the last name mean nothing.
Idealist's signature is three or four overlapping but not quite concentric ellipses. I'm not quite sure what relationship it ever had to an alphabet.
Oh I've known for years that no one else could read my signature. Phft. It was a little surprising to me to realize that I can't read it, though, since I know the quirks of my own handwriting fairly well. In fact, I tried to make it out letter-by-letter the other day, and came up with an actual name that is rather different from the one I use day-to-day.
Something that rhymes with 'Violet'?
Over the last 3 or 4 years I've noticed letters disappearing from my signature. It used to be just my name written in cursive, but recently the "e" has disappeared, and so has half the "v", because curves involved in those letters are the same as curves in letters that come before or after them, so in the interest of time I seem to be refusing to do the same curve twice. So now it looks like a misspelled version of my name in cursive. In order to cover up the embarrassing misspellment, I'll now have to make it illegible.
Idealist's signature is three or four overlapping but not quite concentric ellipses.
But Idealist can point out where each letter of his first name, middle initial and last name are found in those not quite concentric ellipses.
And I thought we'd established in the voyeurism thread that I hadn't been commenting on your stuff.
Apparently my concern over your ladylike sensibilities in that thread was misplaced. And I am pleased to hear that you have had the delicacy not to comment on my stuff, such as it is.
43 makes me laugh a little -- when I was 12 years old and recovering from a traumatic brain injury (auto accident, concussions leading to major paralysis of my left side), I spent a lot of effort on developing neat handwriting. I abjured script and basically tried to make my hand writing look like sans-serif courier. I did pretty well and it has stayed with me, although over the past five years or so my writing has gotten a good deal sloppier. For some reason I also affected a sloppy signature, which has also stayed with me.
I find it suspicious in movies when the hero has amnesia and determines what his name is by looking at something with his signature scrawled on it.
Something unnerving (to me, at least): as I age, my signature begins to develop strong similarities to my father's. Loop placement, size, &c.
("sans-serif courier" might not be meaningful -- I mean to say, "like typewriter text but without serifs".)
Are you supposed to be able to read signatures? I could post an image of mine here and be totally unconcerned that it would offer any clues to my real name. And I can barely write longhand anymore; I have to pick up a pen no more than four or five times a month, and just for a few minutes: write some checks, maybe take notes in a meeting, and that's pretty much it.
Ido not have much enthusiasm for teaching my son handwriting.
54: Yeah, computers are evil. I can't write any more and gave up carrying a pen after I lost the last one. I scribble something on charge slips and the 1040 and that's it. I can't do arithmetic either. That old SF short story is coming true.
I picked a style of signature I liked in 8th grade and it remains unchanged to this day. At the time I had pretty tidy cursive after years of being berated by teachers for my awful penmanship; my handwriting is so bad now that I write in block letters if there's ever a chance someone else will need to read it and my signature is the only cursive of mine that will ever see paper again. I graduated from high school writing like a society lady and now write like I'm in kindergarten.
My handwriting is awful (and printed -- I can't write in cursive) but I too have a carefully crafted illegible signature. It's better than my father's, who simply writes the first initial of his first name and then a line, more or less.
Did anybody else do calligraphy as a youngster? During the same time I am talking about above, I got some Schaeffer pens and tried to learn black letter. I got ok at it and had fun, though never got as good at it as my friend Jason, whom I was imitating. It stayed with me enough that I was able to write our wedding invitations and ketubah, saving a bundle and impressing people in one bold stroke. (The ketubah was copied painstakingly, letter by letter, by non-Hebrew-alphabet-knowing me.)
I feel like the younger a person is these days, the more atrocious their handwriting is. An entire generation has grown up never really having to use pen and paper.
(LB - this October.)
I notice that continental Europeans I know have a more elaborately cursive style than most Brits. Not that my own writing is 'printed' or anything, but some of my European flat mates in the past had writing that looked more like 19th century copperplate in its fluid/elaborate lines. It was quite beautiful but, to eyes not used to it, not particularly legible.
59: Yes, but badly. I had a business with some friends in high school selling buttons: we had some premade, or you could give us a saying you wanted on a button, and I'd letter it for you. But mine was never graceful or particularly attractive -- at the most it was recognizably meant as calligraphy.
Did anybody else do calligraphy as a youngster?
Yes, and this reminds me that I only got paid in cups of coffee and glasses of wine for doing all of my friend's wedding invitations.
You speak as though you did something good.
I did it a little too when I was a kid. Wasn't any good at it, but I liked the pens.
To this day I'd like a really nice old fountain pen.
The only distinctive feature I've detected in the handwriting of continental Europeans is that for some reason they write lambdas instead of 1s.
I've seen the writing workbooks of my wife's nieces and nephews and the basic cursive writing shapes they are making are slightly more 'stylised' and elaborate than those I was taught, I think.
I had one Belgian flatmate whose writing was particularly copper-plate in its appearance, I think that's where my notion that continental writing is distinctive comes from.
I fulfilled my high school art requirement by taking calligraphy, which was puffed up by calling it "pen and ink design". I made some decent money in HS and college lettering bids for formals.
Europeans are trained to make loops in places Americans don't really expect to see them. At the left top of lower-case "r" and "n" and "m", for example. True block printing is somewhat rare in the over 25 year-old demographic.
Yeah, those are all noticeable in my "niece'"'s workbooks. Although, I make them in the course of normal cursive writing a lot of the time I don't remember being taught to make them as part of the isolated letter forms, which seems to be the case there.
My handwriting is decent, and since I keep a paper day planner (bad geek) I actually write by hand fairly often.
The only nice thing I ever heard my dad's mother say about my mother was that she had "lovely penmanship."
69 - Bids = fancy invitations, usually for two people. At my high school, you didn't buy tickets to Prom; you bought bids.
My best friend in High School had the best handwriting ever. Her normal day-to-day handwriting looked like old-fashioned Copperplate.
I've never had any instruction in calligraphy, but handwriting was stressed in my primary education, and there was still—I think I've mentioned this before—a provincial requirement that we be taught to handle straight pen and inkwell. For a few weeks in, I think Grades 3, 4, and 5, the little holes in the top right corners of schooldesks actually had ink bottles in them, and we learn to dip and blot and so on.
I'd say my handwriting is pretty decent, much better than that of either of my kids, who type whenever possible and usually print the rest of the time. My 14-yr-old son has been required to turn in work handwritten in cursive this year, to prepare him for essay questions on standardized tests.
My 14-yr-old son has been required to turn in work handwritten in cursive this year, to prepare him for essay questions on standardized tests.
How could this help him answer essay questions on standardized tests?
Eh, GMATs and GREs are already being given on computer, I hope that the SATs aren't far behind. But you can write block print pretty fast if that's all you did since fifth grade.
74: pretty.
I almost got thrown out of the art program in my high school because my lettering was so bad. If I held the pen correctly I would drag my fist across whatever I had just written. It's hard out there for a left-handed calligrapher.
Legible handwriting is far less important than quick typing.
It's hard out there for a left-handed calligrapher.
I'm told agents can never arrange bouts.
This is interesting: your handwriting is recognizably yours, regardless of the scale. So it's somehow built in to the pattern-making portion of your brain, not the micro- or macro- motor skills parts. (Or maybe it's not interesting but now you're stuck with it.)
I feel like I need to jump on here for a sec to respond what Joe says above about my trip to WHITE NOISE, because it is gob-smackingly wrong.
"Adam Feldman -- This guy was literally so horrified and insulted by the mere notion of attractive Nazi kids singing pop music that he left in the middle of the first act of White Noise (this was for the festival production). He told us later that TONY would have to send someone else, since our show had so thoroughly offended his delicate sensibilities that he couldn't be expected to write objectively about it."
That is not at all what happened. I did leave WHITE NOISE at intermission. But I was not remotely "horrified and insulted" by the premise: On the contrary, I had come to the show in the first place because I thought it sounded like fun. I left not because I was offended, but because I was disappointed. I thought that the show was--sorry, Joe--really not very good: not very funny, not very smart, obvious and repetitive. My main complaint, in fact, was that the show was not offensive *enough*: It took a maudlin U-turn and suddenly tried to get all serious about the dire consequences of racism, squandering the capital of the only parts of the show that had worked (the comic shock value of the girls' songs). Basically--and this is the truth--I left the show out of kindness, because I didn't want to beat up on the creators and cast of the show by panning in print a workshop that had some promising stuff in it but was clearly, in my opinion, not ready to be reviewed.
As for your bizarre contention, Joe, that I "told you later" that your show had offended me and that I couldn't "write objectively about it," well, that conversation simply never took place and you know it. Why you would make such a claim is beyond me.
eoJ, besides being a Nazi, you also called A/dam F/eldman down on our ass. Is this person famous? Should we be worried?
Adam, Nazis have their own unique point of view, just like all of God's other children. Don't be harsh.