Word: readerly
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...What keeps Tintin moving at this relentless pace? The young reader takes it for granted that Tintin will always be on the move, just as he assumes that the Hardy Boys will always be on the trail of one more mystery. But for the grownup reader, it's difficult not to interpret Tintin's constant motion as an evasion of mortality. Tintin's metabolism, like that of all other children's book characters, is governed by a simple law: Stop moving and you grow old and die. Archie and Jughead keep driving around suburbia for the very reason that once...
...REQUEST: "Who were the last 50 of TIME's Men of the Year? More specifically, who among them was bald?" Perhaps this reader's question means we should be prepared for a very specialized achievers list: the Top Chrome Domes of the Century. Although we would not be very comfortable flatly asserting that the following Men of the Year were bald, it would be safe to say they were balding or, better yet, follicularly challenged: Gandhi, Churchill, Eisenhower, Truman, Mossadegh, Khrushchev, Pope John XXIII, Sadat, Gorbachev, De Klerk and Pope John Paul...
...author of this extraordinary job of reporting and writing sees the town's humanity through this very human cop, but well before a reader might say, "Yes, yes, got it," he veers off to tell other stories. What he finds amazes him. You'd be overcome, he muses, if all the town's roofs came off and you were forced to look down--"and not just by malignancy and suffering, but by all the tenderness and joy, all the little acts of courage and kindness...to apprehend it all at once--who could stand...
Indeed, the poem is really accessible only at the emotional, abstract levels. "Understanding" this work would require a conceit of the reader that, I think, has gone out of style in all but the most responsible circles. Each sentence, at least, for readers with stretchier imaginations, does manage to stand on its own--it is the sentence that follows which makes no sense. While each stanza begins with a hint a plot (at times reassuringly contained in quotation marks), its thread is soon lost in a stream of inside-joke-like surreality, such that one imagines the Vivians must...
...through childish seriousness as planes fly overhead and the storm breaks. We should congratulate Ashbery for such luxuriousness--Girls on the Run is heroically aesthetic. Perhaps tragic, perhaps symbolic, Ashbery's poem benefits from the sheer two-dimensionality that a surrealist text always lends to its texts, delighting the reader at the most critical level of appreciation...