Word: antic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Author Crittenden, 29, is a Phi Beta Kappa from Kansas University and has written short stories for The New Yorker and the Atlantic. His literary ancestors range from Nathanael West to Terry Southern to Nichols and May, but he has his own deadpan wit and a wildly antic...
...BRITISH MUSEUM IS FALLING DOWN, by David Lodge. This young British novelist's antic spirit needs leashing, but readers may enjoy the wild ride past several vulnerable institutions, among them the Roman Catholic Church and the airless world of scholarship...
...whatever name, the goal is the same: to sneak out in the dead of night and shroud the victim's house from chimney pot to privet hedge with yard upon yard of toilet paper, preferably the tinted or floral varieties. The antic is performed by boys or girls, but always in pairs or a group. As Sue Simms, 18, a senior at Silver Spring, Md.'s Montgomery Blair High School, points out, "You need someone on the other side of the tree in order to fling the dwindling roll back and forth." And there are rules as well...
...pause in the exodus. One escapee even re-enacted a stunt from the Peter Sellers movie Two Way Stretch: he rode to freedom secreted in side a prison garbage truck, all the while desperately ducking the automatic arm that crushes the refuse. Lest would-be escapees lack so antic an imagination, the Mountbatten committee provided a few suggestions of its own. As it out lined weak points in the prison security system, it theorized about a whole range of potential escapes - from prisoners scooped up by low-flying helicopters to space-age techniques in which an ac complice somehow supplies...
...trouble with this "modern Catholic novel" by Britain's David Lodge, is that its antic spirit, though rich, is also overbearing. Like a TV situation-comedy writer, Lodge tailors his story and his characters to fit a loose collection of gags. The suspicion rises that he thought up the gags first. It is funny, of course, to see firemen swarm through the museum library on a false alarm, hosing down the stray scholar's pipe. But they are dispossessed figures like TV actors left standing on the studio stage while the scenery is being shifted for the next...