Word: shorthand
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...years, Nigel John Davies has been a builder's laborer, a bodyguard, a fairgrounds boxer, an assistant at a beauty parlor, a bet taker at a London bookmaking shop, a salesman of nudie films, a shorthand typist, a paint stripper, a bric-a-brac salesman at the Chelsea antique market, and an interior decorator. He has also been unemployed. But all that was before he met a pencil-thin 15-year-old named Lesley Hornby and said: "You're like a twig. I'll call you Twiggy...
THAT statement, fanciful as it sounds, is simply a shorthand way of saying that everyone is a creature of myth, that the ancient legends and tales of the race are still the master keys to the human psyche. The science-minded Victorians who sneered at myths as superstitious twaddle were guilty of a kind of scientific superstition themselves: the belief that reason could explain all human motives. Aided by psychoanalysis, anthropology and three-quarters of a century of archaeological discovery, modern...
...Callahan holds such laws in contempt and violates them openly. He is compelled to act on his own. This only reinforces Siegel's theme: that both cop and killer are renegades outside society, isolated in combat in their own brutal world. Siegel makes the point in eloquent cinematic shorthand, notably in the film's opening, where a shot of a policeman's badge dissolves into the muzzle of the sniper's rifle, and later when Callahan catches up with the killer in a deserted stadium. The camera draws back from the hunter and his quarry...
Many of QB VII's sins are standard for the genre. The prose is an illiterate shorthand: "Lou was a tall, thin man with a sleepy face whose dominating feature was seventy Sy Devore suits." The plot is interstitched with editorials, sermons and lessons in writing. On the latter subject one can hardly deny Uris his soapbox. He has always been a crude novelist. Yet Exodus is the sixth biggest bestselling novel of the century,* and QB VII, after wintering comfortably atop all the charts, is now second only to Exodus in the author's hardback sales...
...These two pieces are not entirely proof against such doubts. Radical Chic frequently goes too far in Wolfe's "Everybody there felt ..." generalizations. Still, it is generally so accurate that even some of the irate guests at the Bernsteins later wondered how Wolfe−who in fact used shorthand−managed to smuggle a tape recorder onto the premises. Satire is no way to win friends. If the Panthers ever do take over and Wolfe winds up behind bars, who will want to give a bail party...