Word: penman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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FINNEGANS WAKE (Caedmon) has Cyril Cusack and Siobhan McKenna mounting their bisexcycles and wheeling through Joyce's dream landscape with a flair and gusto few readers bring to the book. Cusack's ramble through "Shem the Penman." with its miragelike puns and softly melting sentences, is a triumph of rhythm, sound and suggestion...
...official spokesman of his government declared: "No decisions were made in the Khrushchev-Tito talks [which were] of a purely private character." Private or not, a lot of Yugoslav Communists were being told, officially and in gossip, what had happened at Yalta. "There was one unexpected thing," a Tito penman confessed in the official party organ Borba. "The letter circulated [by the Soviet Communists] to the [satellite] Communist parties . . . expressed the opinion [that] our country and its leadership is not Marxist. [This] is not in the spirit of the . . . Moscow declaration on relations between the Yugoslav Communists and the Soviet...
...history. Miss Manning has been wise in not attempting this, for the result could only be tedious and disastrously confusing. Her arrangement retains a circular form, opening and closing with the members of the wake gathered about the omnipresent coffin-cradle of Finnegan. She has made Shem the Penman spokesman for her piece, and although his antithetical brother Shaun is absent as an explicit character, he does appear in his incarnations of Ondt and Jaunty Jan during the H. C. Earwicker dream sequences. The theme of the river-mother, Anna Livia, is powerfully revealed in the washerwomen episode and successfully...
Highlighting this generally excellent cast are Tom Clancy, as Shem the Penman, Sarah Braverman, as Anna Livia, and Ed Chamberlain and Jac Rogers in a variety of roles. Ken Donahue was entirely enjoyable as everyman H.C.E., although as a result of the adaptation his major function throughout much of the play was to sleep atop the coffin. Joseph Mitchell lent delicacy at appropriate moments in several parts, especially during the dream dramas of H. C. Earwicker which occupied most of the second half of the production, and which were in many ways the most purely entertaining part of the evening...
When the steel pen was replacing the quill around 1800 A.D., the world thought it had chipped and scratched its way to some kind of penman's peak. But steel pens could be pushed no faster than 30 words a minute. By 1867, no less than 51 men had tried and failed to invent a machine that would write faster. The 52nd, Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, succeeded. And in its own way, the typewriter started as big a revolution as the mass-produced Ford...