Word: wits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...taken seriously, then how is he to be taken? He is to be taken, quite simply, for what he is; to wit, he is to be taken for a vastly engaging virtuoso of American prose style who is full of ideas, most of them stimulating and some of them convincing, on religion, psychology, music, letters, politics, education, the South, women, and sundry related topics. His ideas are often largely nonsensical. But they are never completely so. You may be reading through the wildest moments of a polemic against democracy, wondering if he is ever going to stop jabbering, when suddenly...
...beautiful model in New York") spend their winters in Patchen Place, a tree-lined Greenwich Village alley, and their summers at Silver Lake, N.H., where most of the poet's paintings are conceived. At 54 he is a wry, wiry Yankee with the gentle discursiveness and cracker-barrel wit of a farmer taking his ease at the store. Writing about his own mild, middle-of-the-road paintings in the current Art News, Cummings sideswiped most of his fellow artists, abstractionists and realists alike, in a single sentence...
Nobody but nobody was biting its nails like Gimbels. The Polaroid Land camera, which takes and prints a finished picture in one minute, was about to go on sale in Manhattan, and R. H. Macy & Co. had wangled a month's exclusive department-store rights. At its wit's end, Gimbels stealthily bought up a stock of the cameras from out-of-town stores where Polaroid was running test sales, and put in a classy window display. But as soon as Gimbels put the cameras on sale (at $89.75), Macy's sent a flying squad of shoppers...
...bangtail bob, who is probably the most precocious comic to come out of the wings since Milton Berle was a Wunderkind. Young Jerry already has good control of half-a-dozen comedy styles. He can deliver a gag, dance & sing, play the sappy adolescent ("If I go wit' girls, I get pimples") or ape a romantic singer ("Dance, Mrs. Resnick, dance!"). When Dean asks, "Why did you bring your car to New York?" Jerry says, in what seems the perfect answer for Jerry: "I need it here for accidents...
...nostalgia to blind him to the bad aspects of the good old days: "The conversation and habits of those times were as starcht as their bands and square beards; and gravity was then taken for wisdom. The doctors in those days were but old boys, when quibbles past for wit even in their sermons...