Word: dustpan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Anyone shrewd enough to make a living in the man-of-letters dodge knows that an occasional desk-clearing miscellany, a dustpan with hard covers, will be indulged between actual, seat-of-the-pants books. To E. (for Edgar) L. (for Lawrence) Doctorow's credit, he includes no commencement speeches, letters to the Times, book reviews or similar lint balls in this between-books collection. Instead, the author of Ragtime and Loon Lake offers six short stories, impeccably done, rather academic, mostly forgettable, and one 65-page mishmash called, for want of an accurate tag, a novella. The mishmash...
...battered album called "With Compliments from Firestone in STEREOPHONIC SOUND," which my father got for 59 cents at a Cincinnati gas station in 1966. We also got about a dozen smoky-blue-rippled dinnerware glasses, all of which have long since gone the way of the broom and dustpan. But the old LP has persisted, and every year it comes out with the tinsel and the ornaments. And everyone in the family sings along as Mel Torme croons, "Chest-NUHHHHHTs roasting on an open (skip) nose. Yuletide carols being hung by (skip) Eskimos...." And, frankly...
...brought upon this production a plague of unfunny punch lines and lackluster performances. There are a couple of droll sight gags (Goliath's oversize undershorts hanging out to dry; Coco at work in the pharaoh's palace, trying to sweep up hundreds of frogs with a dustpan and broom), but nothing can redeem Wholly Moses! from its destiny of eternal mirthlessness. It is a tattered Torah indeed, a comedy made out of hole cloth...