Word: jests
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Kudelka’s decision to cast women as the step-sisters, as opposed to the traditional strategy of employing men, was rooted in the hope that they would pull off the shtick and slap-stick humor with more high-brow jest than the gender-bending farce. Cornejo herself was more naturally entertaining at ABT than were Tempe Ostergren and Megan Gray here, but both are leggy beauties who mugged with aplomb...
...During our interview, I asked Michelle what accounts for the discrepancy between the admiration she inspires among such voters and the kind of blogosphere and talk-radio slurs that prompted the New Yorker, even if in jest, to run its notorious cover cartoon of her standing with her husband in the Oval Office, sporting an Afro and an AK-47. "I've realized that there are two conversations that go on," she said. "There's one at the punditry level - the polls, the writers, the folks in the know, they have one set of conversations - and then there's what...
...first of all. I was going to mention him in my entrance essay; the thinking was that the name-drop might bring some ‘pop’ to an otherwise mundane isle of prose. But it’s so much easier pretending to like Infinite Jest now that its author’s atop the big reading list in the sky. I suffered through half of that thing back in 2005, back when the guy was kicking around Claremont—what a waste of time that...
Reading it now, with the burden of hindsight, one sees that Infinite Jest is ominously infested with suicides, including that of the hero's father, who cooks his own head in a microwave. But back then, Wallace seemed invulnerable. How could a man who had put such crowds of people on the page--Wallace's ear for dialogue was unmatched in contemporary fiction--truly be lonely? Once you've gone inside the mind of a critically burned toddler, as Wallace did in his short story "Incarnations of Burned Children," what horrors can't you face? When he accepted a professorship...
What was "it"? In Infinite Jest Wallace wrote--in a passage that now reads like a lucid cell-phone call from the pilot of a crashing 747--that clinical depression is "lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one." What Wallace suffered was both agonizing and indescribable, even by him. And that last may have been what made it unbearable. Like Hamlet--who gave Infinite Jest its title--he had that within which passeth show. Even if he could have written...