Word: witting
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LUIGI PIRANDELLO'S Chee Chee, at the Loeb Ex tonight through Saturday, reminds us that brevity is sometimes the ghost of wit. Pirandello wrote this half-act play in 1920, a year before Six Characters in Search of an Author and two years before Henry IV. Chee Chee bears the same relationship to these two pillars of Italian drama as that of calisthenics to a crucial football game. We see Pirandello going through the motions of the themes central to his work--the illusion of reality, the reality of illusion, the multiplicity of character, the exploitation of roles in human...
...front, under the heading: "Other Books by the Narrator") are in the same category. They contribute to the sense of parody, the feeling that Vadim is an "inferior variant" of Vladimir, but aside from that they serve only as another vehicle for still more exercises of arcane wit. Nabokov aficionados will take pleasure in matching up these variant titles with the originals, or comparing, say, Vadim's precocious daughter with Nabokov's Lolita, but no real light is shed by the kind of wordplay that turns the real-life Camera Obscura into the fictional Camera Lucida, or by a stereotyped...
...broken glass is used to fret the strings to produce a strong, lowdown sound. A few decades ago it was the sound of a whole genus of American music that might be called backroads blues. Today its best exponent is Ry Cooder, a guitarist and singer of wry wit and concentrated energy who has extended the troubadour tradition of Woody Guthrie and fashioned a distinctive personality for himself from the shards of the American musical past...
...Clair. A former Marine captain and star blocking back at the University of Wyoming, Neal is not even especially eloquent. His strength is the sine qua non of all great trial lawyers: preparation. During the past months, he has often put in ten-hour days with a single Watergate wit ness, then worked on into the night cross-checking each statement. Neal's concentration is total. After he had spent a long session with John Dean one Sunday in September, Mrs. Dean called to ask about her husband's reaction to the pardon announced by President Ford that...
...Reed can hardly be accused of eye rolling and cakewalking for his supper. His angers and resentments are sheathed in intelligence, learning, scatological wit and showmanship. One thinks of Redd Foxx before he was San-fordized, or Philip Roth confronting his middle-class American Jewish background in ways that have been judged, perhaps too hastily, as self-hateful and tasteless. Likewise, many blacks may find themselves both amused and offended by The Last Days of Louisiana Red, a combination circus freak show, detective story, Negro Dead Sea Scroll and improvised black-studies program...