[lit-ideas] Found Art
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 14:42:39 +0900
In Lee Siegel's Harper's magazine review of _Just Enough Liebling:
Classic Work by the Legendary New Yorker Writer_, I come across two
paragraphs that strike me as worth remembering.
The first makes a useful distinction:
> A literary profile is the verbal equivalent of a drawing, painting, or
> photograph: just one side of a person, that side he or she wishes to
> make public. A portrait, on the other hand, is a revelation, an
> exposure. A portrait aspires to full disclosure; it captures a person
> in chiaroscuro, both the revealed as well as the secret places.
I wonder if it is original? Or if someone here knows of another source?
The second is a description of style:
> This subtle, respectful, simultaneously fang-exposing and gently
> defanging comedy was the essence of Liebling's prose. It explains his
> liking for fancy-sounding language that both conceals and expresses
> low impulses, a type of verbal burlesque that itself recalls the
> faux-formal badinage of one of the great insouciants of all time: W.
> C. Fields. A slow, sly laughter, after all, is the only sane response
> to destiny's incessant ringing slaps.
I wonder whose fangs, the writer's or the subject's, are being exposed
and extracted.
John L. McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama, Japan 220-0006
Tel 81-45-314-9324
Email John.McCreery@xxxxxxxxxxxx
"Making Symbols is Our Business"
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
