Word: reader
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...would founder Cliff Hillegass want anyone to restrict themselves to the Notes's digestion of a book. He reminds students in the "Note to the Reader" prefacing each edition, "The goal of education is not the unquestioning acceptance of any single interpretation...
...work (O'Hara once remarked to a friend on the small size of his audience: "You could fit the people I write for into your john all at the same time without raising an eyebrow"). Although O'Hara's poems to friends create an intimacy in which the reader can often share, Gooch's book adds a valuable contextual frame to works like "Chez Jane," "For Grace, After A Party," "Embarassing Bill," "Vincent And I Inaugurate A Movie Theatre" and "At Joan...
Somewhere along the course of this narrative, as Claude's triumphs on the concert tour follow one after another, as the music world's most eminent performers clamor for his accompaniment, a reader may become jaded with unalloyed success. What is the point of going on? Aren't there any problems in this book? Unfortunately, the only serious trouble to visit Conroy's story occurs when Claude is at the keyboard. Here is what happens when he sits in on a jazz session: "G minor C seventh, A-flat minor D-flat seventh, A minor D seventh, B-flat minor...
Cohen meets some interesting people on his "cross-country quest for a generation." He brings the reader along as he visits with Dirk, a New York artist and dope dealer; Dexter, a Louisiana politician who is in it for the money; and David, a Korean-American who works in his parents grocery store in South Central Los Angeles. It's wonderful simply to have vicarious conversations with these people, to hear about their lives and dreams and work and loves and fears...
...while, though, the profiles achieve a certain predictability. There's a nagging superficiality--while we read responses to questions about family background and the American Dream, we wonder what it's like to really spend a week, or even a day, in the shoes of these people. The reader gets the sense of having spent an hour talking to each of the people in the book, and that often fails to translate into understanding the people, or even knowing them the way Cohen would have if he had followed them around...