Word: wrongs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After reading your article on the New Right, I came to the conclusion that they don't know right from wrong, and that a new dirty tricks department is in the making...
Martin can't sustain one narrative idea for more than two of even these decimated pages, anyway. And, unlike his stage appearances, he can't just spreadeagle and say "Excuuuuse me!" when things go wrong. Even so, you had a right to expect more from Martin's book. Maybe one funny piece. Or one funny line...
Reading this book can induce paranoia. You'll sit there, turning pages, wondering why you're not laughing, wondering whether it's something wrong with you and not Steve Martin, wondering whether the editors at Putnam have really lost it this time, hoping that the next two-page piece will be a little better...
...became a cult figure in the late '60s after enduring years of hard-earned obscurity. A growing army of high school and college readers began proclaiming him a deep thinker, at about the same time that critics started cuffing him for being a shallow artist. Both judgments were wrong. Vonnegut has never written a thought that could not occur to a sporadically meditative teenager, nor has he pretended to; those who are impressed by the profundity of a shrug ("So it goes") have probably found the guru they deserve. At the same time, Vonnegut...
Americans must beware, however, of looking for decadence in the wrong places. The things that can make the nation decay now are not necessarily what we think of when we say decadence: they are not Roman extravagances or Baudelaire's fleurs du mal, or Wilde's scented conceits. Nor, probably, do they have much to do with pornography, license or bizarre sexual practice. It is at least possible that Americans should see the symptoms of decadence in the last business quarter's alarming 3.8% decline in productivity, or in U.S. society's catastrophic dependence upon foreigners...