Word: hacks
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Monsieur is no exception. The au thor of the lush and intricate Alexandria Quartet here invents a novelist named Blanford, who invents a novelist named Sutcliffe, who caricatures Blanford mercilessly as "Bloshford," a bestselling hack. The book is one of those box-within-box amusements: Sutcliffe, as a character in a novel by Blanford, cracks up in the process of writing a novel in which he misinterprets the situations of some of his friends, other Blanford characters. These convolutions lead to the expectable mild ironies of viewpoint, but the plot is too sketchily developed to constitute the novel...
Scott's stories in Bits of Paradise give the impression that he wrote them quickly and without much attention, as if the bill collector were beating at the door. The stories are not hack jobs, but they are a bit slick and simplistic, making Fitzgerald's unmistakable heroes and heroines mighty unbelievable. Not surprisingly, eight of the eleven stories in this collection first appeared in the Post...
...publication of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, we have at last some substantiation that Watson, at least, actually lived--and died in 1940--and that Doyle was only the distracted doctor and inoffensive scribbler we'd like him to be. We owe these revelations to Nicholas Meyer (evidently a hack on the rise, he wrote 400 film reviews for his college paper) who had the good fortune to be in the right place when Watson's last manuscript surfaced in a London attic 31 years after it left Dr. Watson's control...
There is a legend, fostered notably by a Pushkin poem and later by Rimski-Korsakov in an opera (Mozart and Sa-lieri), that Salieri poisoned Mozart. Scholars discount the thesis, but there is no doubt that Salieri hindered the career of his younger colleague. Small wonder. Salieri was a hack who saw Mozart as a threat to his own reputation. Is such historical byplay justification enough for combining the two works at this late date? Alas, no. Prima la Musica has about 15 minutes of passable music; at a length of 70 minutes, it is maddeningly vapid...
...Times--perhaps because of assumptions it makes about its readers or perhaps out of sloppiness--didn't bother to recognize the possibility that people might not see the memorandum for the hack job it is. It never placed the profile in the context of a contrived and systematic attempt to discredit the Ellsberg defense and only in a news story three pages away did it quote anyone as questioning the profile's accuracy. The Times presumed that everyone has realized just how demented Richard Nixon and his government are, and that's not a safe assumption for anyone, let alone...