July 2013
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We have goats, two Nigerian pygmies, ex-boys, 9 weeks old. Ella ((10), returning home from a session with the kids. "The black goat totally tried to eat my pants." A perfect sentence, utterly original, utterly wonderful.
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The new Much Ado is a charming, understated success. The actors are not trained Shakespeareans; they're tv series folk, and they say the lines conversationally and casually, paying scant attention to the verse or to the mannered prose rhythms. It works, on the whole, although some of the great lines are delivered so unemphatically that…
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Some years ago, I was doing time at a world-famous research library. One of the other inmates posed a problem to the assembled denizens. A Frenchman, he was translating an American novel into his native tongue and there was a passage in the book that he could not understand. He thought it might be a…