Word: wits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Your quotation from Susanna Kirk '95-'97 was clearly taken out of context from a shocked and upset victim of a horrible circumstance. Her statements were never intended to be taken literally, much less quoted. As a witness to your interviewer's obvious inexperience and horrible interrogation of Ms. Kirk, e.g., "How does it feel to know that your room is burning up right now?" I am appalled by his complete misunderstanding of sarcasm or wit. I admit that Ms. Kirk should have known better than to trust The Crimson with a chance to use swear words in a front...
Wallace's wit and funky erudition encores this year in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Little, Brown; 353 pages; $23.95), a collection of essays and highly personalized journalism. Writing about subjects as unrelated as tennis, Dostoyevsky and Caribbean cruise ships, Wallace again demonstrates powers of split-screen vision and information processing that should be measured in megabytes rather than IQ points...
...author seems to have dropped his pants and not cared: each piece is full of painful, embarrassing details presented as casual confessional. But Sedaris' earnest delivery never conceals his subversive, impish wit, a thing upon which the world's pretentions and neuroses are skewered...
...career journalist whose wit, flair and savoir vivre became personal trademarks, Bauby saw his fast-paced life come to an abrupt end on Dec. 8, 1995, with the stroke that left him paralyzed. Though Bauby was dependent on hospital staff and machinery for all his bodily functions, his brain remained unscathed. He soon discovered that the only muscle still under his control was his left eyelid. By telegraphing a series of blinks, Bauby let his nurses know that his mind was alive and well inside its immobile frame. They responded by reciting a special alphabet to him with the understanding...
...sometimes even joys--of the locked-in life. Bemoaning his fruitless "physical rehabilitation" sessions, for example, Bauby writes, "I would be the happiest man in the world if I could just properly swallow the saliva that permanently invades my mouth." He lets his readers know that his celebrated wit survived the stroke by pointing up the ironic aspects of his condition. Bauby recalls a contract he signed before his illness to write an updated version of the Alexandre Dumas classic The Count of Monte Cristo--a tale involving a paralyzed protagonist who communicates by blinking. "The gods of literature...