Word: reader
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...Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, gathered by Musicologist Robert Kimball, is a model of typography, design and scholarship. The oversize book can lie indolently on a piano, ready to recall the hits of four decades. Because shows are arranged in chronological order, the reader can watch Porter's growth from restless experimenter to self-assured master. Early on, the songwriter attempted to overturn the bromides of his epoch. When saccharine "Mammy" tunes permeated Broadway, he celebrated a black man who journeyed back to Tennessee only to miss "the great big tall skyscrapers/ And the elevated's roar...
...English Pierrot, the clown whose laughter cannot quite disguise the catch in his throat. Of the nearly 300 songs in Coward's collection, the dead-on love ballads are the weakest: "Time and tide can never sever/ Those whom love has bound forever" serves to remind the reader that Coward grew up in the Edwardian heyday. But such songs as I'll See You Again, Someday I'll Find You and A Room with a View display the author's unique amalgam of anticipation and nostalgia ("Time may he heavy between,/ But what has been...
Travel reading, when you think about it, is a fairly odd pastime. Essentially, the travel reader is paying someone else, the travel writer, to take a trip for him: not a perilous hunt for the white whale or the source of the Niger, usually, but just a plain old trip. The writer agrees, by implication, to inspect sunsets and pretty girls, to sniff sea air when this is appropriate, to eat and drink fearlessly, to be overcharged by taxi drivers, and to report back. The reader agrees, for some reason, to subsidize this gamboling...
...farther than is necessary to get to the nearest horse track or trout stream. It is true that in one instance in this collection of ten essays, the nearest track is in Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex, England, and in another it is in Florence, Italy. Nevertheless, the reader still capable of shame must feel guilty of a stunning level of shiftlessness: he is letting another man win his bets for him (Barich admits to occasional losses but does not dwell on them), and even catch and eat his fish. As in any such gigolo-gigolee relationship, exquisite tact is required...
...third Tuesday of every month in the fall and winter of 1980, a bizarre rendezvous allegedly took place in Washington, D.C. A Navy officer in a plain civilian suit carried a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist into the parlor of "Madame Zodiac," psychic and palm reader. By looking at top-secret photographs and charts, the clairvoyant attempted to predict the movements of Soviet submarines off the East Coast. Madame Zodiac's payment: $400 cash...