Word: riffs
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Faced with a virtual cipher at the center of his tale, Irving works energetically to create distractions around the edges. He has some good fun ridiculing Wallingford's employer, calling the all-news outfit "Disaster International" and the "calamity channel," and he does a lively riff on the marathon coverage that followed John F. Kennedy Jr.'s fatal plane crash in the summer of 1999. After a while, though, all this mockery of the excesses of TV news begins to seem a fish-in-the-barrel (or a carp-in-the-teacup) sort of enterprise...
...could alter or edit any portion of the document. But such assurances may not be enough if the affidavit was false on its face, and Condit did urge her to sign it as is. Beyond that, the case could come down to dueling dictionaries. Remember Bill Clinton's riff on "the meaning of 'is'"? The word "romantic," contained in the Smith-Condit affidavit, might be subject to similar parsing: "I do not and have not had a romantic relationship with Congressman Condit." Romantic and sexual aren't synonymous, as many a jilted lover has learned all too painfully...
Later that day I got a qualified thank-you e-mail from student Adam Riff, who invited me to hang out with a dozen friends in his parents' living room, where they tried to make me feel better. "We all enjoyed watching the principal squirm and turn red in the face," Adam offered. I was also told I was in good company because Star Trek Voyager's LeVar Burton spoke last year...
...plays for an audience that's out for a good time. Like the early novelists, his primary source material is in the drift heaps of mass culture. But from those things he produces work that's not just enjoyable but also edifying: his abrupt couplings of borrowed sound--a riff sampled off an old 45, a scrap of dialogue from an old movie--point us to connections we've never made before...
...Later that day I got a qualified thank-you e-mail from student Adam Riff, who invited me to hang out with a dozen friends in his parents' living room, where they tried to make me feel better. "We all enjoyed watching the principal squirm and turn red in the face," Adam offered. I was also told I was in good company because Star Trek Voyager's LeVar Burton spoke last year...