Word: witting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Rockefeller, advertising his "availability" in the first of a series of speeches on national problems, addressed himself to the urban crisis in a half-hour weighty but well reasoned address that left the editors slightly comatose. Richard Nixon, by contrast, sparkled in a relaxed format that mixed stand-up wit with graceful repartee before a panel of four editors. The same editorial audience that clapped for Rockefeller only twice-and then none too loudly-interrupted Nixon's speech with applause 15 times...
Beneath the bitchy, lancing wit of the verbal byplay, Playwright Mart Crowley keeps a dead-level eye on the desolating aspects of homosexual life. He records the loveless, brief encounters, the guilt-ridden, blackout reliance on alcohol, the endless courtship rat race of the gay bars with its inevitable quota of rejection, humiliation and loneliness. Crowley underscores the fact that while the homosexual may pose as a bacchanal of nonconformist pagan delights, he frequently drinks a hemlock-bitter cup of despair...
...repertory, some never before seen in this country. One of the best is Job Sanders' Impressions, which uses Paul Klee paintings as "points of departure" for seven vignettes (set to music by American Composer Gunther Schuller) that capture both the painter's economy and his wit. There is sexy balletic humor in a spoof of Arab amour that features sinuous ballerina Willy de la Bije as the most languid odalisque ever to scratch herself where it itches. Most ambitious American entry is Glen Tetley's The Anatomy Lesson, which takes as its starting point Rembrandt...
...durable myth of Frankenstein surface from Durrell's dazzling assemblage. There are reams of the kind of beautiful travel and nature writing for which his Bitter Lemons, Prospero's Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus have been praised. There are flashes of the ribald wit that makes his volumes about the British diplomatic corps such delights. But there is also much over writing. The book is littered with show-off phrases such as "alembicated piety" and "the penetralia of one's self-regard." The mixed metaphors are painful: "I lay on the slab, the mortuary slab...
Honor Tracy resembles a particularly mean Irish longshoreman on strike. Her corner-of-the-mouth wit has the fine rollicking belligerence that keeps everyone within eavesdropping distance of the drunk at the end of the bar. But sure, Honor is a bit of a fraud. The fist she brandishes so threateningly is really papier-mache. Her secret problem is that she is a satirist who faints at the sight of blood. Her seventh novel has all the brilliance of an expertly pulled punch...