Word: wises
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...from mind to mind with no perceptible voice to bridge the gaps. All that floating free sometimes can give readers mental seasickness. To avoid this, most authors use plot for ballast. The plot structures the thoughts, the thoughts give added resonance to the "real events." In A.N. Wilson's Wise Virgin, however, the balance breaks down, and plot and ideas end up in a predictable and boring...
...Wise Virgin's plot is about the balance between promiscuity and monasticism, and between innocence and cynicism. Witness the title: to modern lascivious ears, "wise virgin" sounds like an innocent losing here naivete. But in the "Treatise of Heavenly Love," the pet project of a medievalist named Giles Fox, the phrase refers to the Gospel parable of the wise and foolish virgins. Those who have "kept burning that holy light of virginity in their lamps can present themselves spotless to their Lord and Lover," says the thirteenth-century sermon, but their concupiscent comrades will be damned by their "fleshly lusts...
...clever characters in the book do not seem to balance with Giles' weighty gloom. It is hard to see the world, so to speak, through a blind man's eyes, and hard to make funny stories with happy endings out of morose ideas. Wise Virgin's cleverness just cannot buoy up its hero's dead weight...
Perhaps the problems are temporary, as the various companies claim. Perhaps not. "The Roman Empire never actually fell," one wise woman has said. "The falling was just an endless series of announcements, like 'The messenger service doesn't stop here on Saturday any more.' " The only thing needed to make the decay of the telephone service even more exasperating is the same pollution that afflicts the Postal Service, not junk mail but phone calls from computers that summon you out of the bathtub to hear their spiels for more life insurance. The Internal Revenue Service has even...
Young Candy was, of course, the daughter of Edgar Bergen, the enormously popular ventriloquist who delighted the country Sunday evenings on radio's Chase & Sanborn show. But that meant that she was also the little sister of Charlie McCarthy, Bergen's cheeky, insulting, wise-guy dummy. A peculiar sibling rivalry existed, in fact, that went far beyond the obvious joke kept alive by newspaper feature writers. Charlie was a startling alter ego for the dour Swedish ventriloquist-that was what Candice Bergen made the act work so well-and he was already a star when Candy was tiny...