Word: artlessly
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...style is picaresque, the message is salvation through health food, and the medium is Millroy, a road-show magician. Part Jesus, part Prospero, part yogi, he alone would make this a novel to conjure with. But Theroux adds another delight, Jilly Farina, a plucky adolescent with an artless narrative voice that, like Huckleberry Finn's, grabs and holds the reader's attention from the first page: "I had walked from Gaga's in Marstons Mills to Mashpee, where Dada was living with Vera, his Wampanoag woman, and when I got there he was black-out drunk and she was gone...
Melzer is a dumpy, artless man with thick, black-rimmed glasses. "I've never broken the law anywhere," he insists, "and I've never, never, in any way, shape or form done anything improper" at Bronx Science. Answering what he thought was an inquiry from a British pedophile society (in reality, it was a postal-service sting), he wrote in 1979 that he was "attracted to boys up to the age of about 16" but added that he was "not willing to engage in unlawful acts...
Running nearly an hour, the music could not be more artless: an endlessly repeated tape loop of a now deceased London derelict intoning a hymn tune. "Jesus' blood never failed me yet," he sings. "There's one thing I know, for He loves me so." The old man's voice is untrained and shaky. And yet the tape, recorded in 1971 for a documentary film, has an undeniable dignity that Bryars found irresistible. Starting with a simple piano accompaniment, the composer gradually expanded the orchestration in a series of live performances, which culminated in 1975 in a half-hour recording...
...years Walcott has divided his calendar equally between Boston, where he teaches literature and creative writing at Boston University, and a residence in Trinidad, a base for his frequent travels elsewhere in the Caribbean. This regular shuttling between two worlds has kept his poetry balanced between heartless skill and artless passion. The speakers of Walcott's poems are half strangers wherever they find themselves, not because they want to be but because they have no choice. In The Lighthouse, an island vendor approaches the poet and smiles: "Fifty? Then/ you love home harder than youth...
...famous book, was based on Tom Blankenship, a poor white boy in Hannibal, Mo. But Fishkin argues that Huck's voice was in part inspired by Jimmy, a 10-year-old black servant. Twain described this boy in an 1874 article in the New York Times as "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across." Added Twain: "He did not tell me a single remarkable thing, or one that was worth remembering. And yet he was himself so interested in his small marvels, and they flowed so naturally and comfortably from his lips that . . . I listened...