Word: gibberish
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...looks like a nasty little shocker but is really that rare thing in English letters-a philosophical novel. The point may be overlooked because the hero, a teen-age monster, tells all about everything in nadsat, a weird argot that seems to be all his own. Nadsat is neither gibberish nor a Joycean exercise. It serves to put Alex where he belongs-half in and half out of the human race...
...direct, untrammeled belief of the primitive Christians, a return to the original experiences of the apostles. They believe literally in the gift of tongues granted the apostles at Pentecost, and occasionally someone in the congregation feels called upon to rise and shout in a foreign language or a wailing gibberish unintelligible even to believers...
...cruelly insistent friend:/ You cannot smile at me and make an end." But when the explosion of tradition and the routini- zation of expression coincide, when the scenery falls down, the audience packs up, and all dialogue, even the best, reduces itself to threatening, because patterned, gibberish, the quality of dramatic action becomes infected by a kind of eccentric Spieltrieb, the aesthetic play of the "humorous" cripple. To act upon the assumptions of a rejected humanism is tonic, or at least good for kick, and wry glimpses of a hypothetical salvation may still be achieved in the pick...
This flawless (because meaningless) fragment of prose is offered as a parody of the once-famed gibberish of Gertrude Stein, and is the work of an unknown writer, Arthur Flegenheimer. It is one of the more recondite items in this anthology of Dwight Macdonald, critic, polemicist and New Yorker staff writer. To see just how recondite it is, the reader must not miss the footnote, in which it is disclosed that the obscure Flegenheimer is Mobster Dutch Schultz, and that the Stein "parody" is a police stenographer's transcript of his dying delirium. Such thimbleriggery is a fair sample...
...freight car's brake and then, perilously, slip blocks of wood under the wheels; the arrogant, slow-motion skill of well-paid oldtimers in clean overalls; the trainman's contempt for the placid, nonrolling civilian world. The author's stream-of-consciousness gibberish is fairly effective as he tells of being summoned at 4:30 a.m. to catch an early run ("I wake up ... in the mouth of the night and there everything knows that I have no mother, and no sister, and no father and no bot sosstle, but not crib...