Word: reader
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...heard the sage advice to "write what you know." It is evident that Cambridge native Mameve Medwed is doing just that in her latest novel, Host Family. She knows Cambridge well. Very well. So well, in fact, that she has laid out every detail of it for the reader. From the Loeb to Mr. Bartley's to Pennypacker to Brattle Street, nothing is left to the imagination. If you're looking for subtlety, Host Family is not the book...
...Elkies is not the buffest guy in Cambridge. Perhaps not even in Lowell House. But is he the buffest Harvard professor ever to be published in the American Chess Journal, win the Math Olympiad and write an opera? We'll leave that as an exercise to the reader...
...Although the Bush camp preemptively bought dozens of domain names, including georgebush.com, over a year ago in an attempt to stave off such parodies, they were unable to cover all the bases. And thus on the unofficial site in question, it takes quite a while for the reader to realize that not all is what it appears to be. In the non-Internet world, on the other hand, if someone wanted to make fun of, say, TIME magazine, they could do everything but use the exact, copyrighted name, which would provide a more obvious indication of a parody...
This selective fiddling with history constantly distracts the reader from the fictional surface of Oates' narrative. When a detail looks wrong, at odds with what is known, is Oates inventing it (and if so, to what purpose?), or has she simply made a mistake? Why does she put a video camera in the hands of a fan in 1954? Why does she have the ex-Athlete, musing on his baseball career, think of "playoffs and the Series" when playoffs would not occur until 15 years later...
...institution-loving PBS) and reads--and lives out--a different story every episode. But the real stars are the words that the program's Sesame Street-esque skits, songs and cartoons cleverly bring to life, teaching kids to read along and sound out words onscreen. A Motown group, Martha Reader and the Vowelles, sings new vowel sounds; Dr. Ruth Wordheimer (played by Dr. Ruth Westheimer) helps patients deal with "long-word freak-out"; and in "Gawain's Word," a spoof on Wayne's World, jousting knights representing phonemes (sn and ooze for example) collide to make words (snooze for example...