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...thirty-two of which constitute Baby, it's Cold Inside. These pieces rely not so much on characters or situations but on the comic possibilities of words themselves. Perelman is a master of a bewildering array of trite and overused literary styles, and has a vocabulary the size of Webster's Unabridged. Above all, he knows precisely when to use the obscure word, the foreign phrase, or the outlandish simile for maximum effect...
IMAGINATIONS by William Carlos Williams. Edited by Webster Schott. 363 pages. New Directions...
...Imaginations, Critic Webster Schott has collected and perceptively introduced five experimental works that reveal Williams struggling for what he called an "intense vision of the facts" -a style and form that would do justice to both his imagination and his reality. Scribbled between patients or late at night, these pages have the fascinating openness and vulnerability of a writer's notebook. In these five works, produced between the ages of 34 and 48, he took on the calculated gamble of nearly automatic writing: all or nothing. "I let the imagination have its own way to see if it could...
...letters, was caught in a literary lapse by a New York Times reader who could not believe that the Presidential Counsellor meant to say "We have become a noisome country" in a recent speech. Moynihan confessed in his letter to the paper that "after hasty consultation with Webster's Second Edition," he had tried-unsuccessfully-to swing a deal with a reporter to have the word rendered as "querulous." Then he concluded with a verbal flourish: "Thus does truth subvert semantics...
...word is unknown to Webster, but to protesters it means discrimination against women in employment, politics, art and so forth...