Word: wit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hero of Winterreise by noting that Schubert consistently describes reality in a minor key and changes into the major only when he is shifting into fantasy. This is a somewhat technical point, necessarily, for most writing about music is either technical or gush. In addition, Robinson has the wit to confess "that I occasionally make the music say more than it really wants to, that I have extracted unearned intellectual capital from a phrase, a passage, or a modulation whose true significance remains ineffable--i.e., purely musical...
Tickled to Death (Scribners; 231 pages; $13.95) is a collection of short stories, only one of them featuring Author Simon Brett's delightful amateur detective, the hammy and frequently out-of-work actor Charles Paris. Brett's ten Paris novels thrive on their bitchy wit and backstage authenticity. Outside those environs his writing can become fey and whimsical. But Brett is a specialist at sketching protagonists who are at once charming and palpably rotten, so that their ultimate escape or exposure remains a matter of genuine suspense...
...destructive hackers have some wit, albeit menacing. In a program called the Cookie Monster, the screen suddenly goes blank. Seconds later, the words "I want a cookie" appear. If the user types "cookie," the machine returns to normal. A few years ago, Richard Skrenta Jr., an 18-year-old Northwestern University student, wrote a virus program called Cloner. Every 30th time a disk containing the program is used, the virus harmlessly flashes a few verses across the screen; then the interrupted task resumes where it left off. "I wrote it as a joke to see how far it would spread...
...unhurried pace, and the amplitude with which it envisions the land, its alternation of the idyllic and the menacing, evokes one of that era's classic forms, the road movie. And then, in effect, reimagines it. Here the road movie's traditional protagonist, the wayfarer whose only resources are wit and courage, is transformed into a young girl. Enchantingly played by Meredith Salenger, 14, Natty is obviously more imperiled by the hobo life than a man would be. And her gumption flatters without fawning upon the modern young woman's sense of her sex's expanded capabilities...
While perhaps not as pithy or insightful as some of its cinematic counterparts, “waydowntown” certainly provides interesting commentary and sarcastic wit to boot. And though thoroughly depressing for those destined to empty lives as corporate minions, “waydowntown” doesn’t hold back in exposing corporate behemoths as the soul-stealers they...