Word: langly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plan of the book seems to represent a cynical reckoning on the reading public. It suggests that people will shrug off the question of an author's skill if their voyeuristic urges are satisfied. A less frenetic life probably wouldn't have been placed on a par with Lang's writing. Lurie's memoir leads you to Lang's work by way of a detour that impinges on her privacy unnecessarily. It is an approach Lang denounces in one of her verse-plays...
...Lurie often mentions Lang's reticence. She had a noncommittal way of referring to herself and others. If she was asked to describe a person, their name was about all that could be coaxed out of her. A feeling of coldness turns up often as a metaphor in Lang's writing, and it implies that the distance she keeps, her frigidity, is a way of defending her independence...
...your curiosity on a stranger. Since the subject lacks initial interest, the style is crucial. Sometimes Lurie fails to realize that the punch line of a memory is easier to deal with if you were there, and her reflections are smothered by commonplace observations and a chummy attitude toward Lang. She doesn't come through with the kind of technique that gets around your indifference to, say, Gorey's insomnia, often enough: "I went upstairs. Ted had been up for hours he said. 'I don't really like sleeping lately,' he apologized, as if it had been an acquaintance...
...LANG'S WRITING is uneven too. She produces poems impatiently, without turning around to locate and pare away the bland passages. Perhaps her negligence results from the attitude that "Poetry can never be much more than a commentary, At best a breathless summation, for what words, What words existed before their source...
...burlesque house, the language sounds stilted, as though the characters were parodying the contrived and choreographed world of their jobs. She deliberately scatters cliches through the speech of inarticulate dancers and comics--phrases they'd be likely to resort to in reality, but, as the author, Lang is not able to dissociate herself from their triteness...