DETATED a nonce word in the
joky expression 'his capa was detated', that is, he was decapitated.
Joky banter in one firm is viewed as tasteless harassment in another.
The pantomime aspect is certainly there, but its
joky tone, one can see, has been increased by Lewis: 'Aber bei able dem, sagte Andreas Gritti: bei able dem muss ich dennoch gestehn, der Abaellino ist ein seltner Mensch, der, wenn er vielleicht an der Spizze eines Heers stande, die halbe Welt erobern wurde.
PROF Hildegard Hammerschmidt-hummel isn't the fictional name for some
joky faux Prussian academic character appearing in a satirical column.
Questions about her love life or even her age are batted away with a
joky laugh, and a polite explanation that a piece about her might benefit from some basic details fails to elicit anything more.
The identification is
joky, of course, confounding private with public sincerity, but it is also very serious.
Larkin's title digs ironically at the confident rootedness of an earlier day, represented by the poem all children used to learn at school, Thomas Hood's "I remember, I remember, the house where I was born." But, in a characteristic modern ploy, his friend's phrase "have your roots" is distanced as
joky cliche by the use of ironic scare quotes.
Rossi's usual austerity (either blank walls or masonry planes penetrated by the most rigorously regular grid of rectangular windows) is set off by what -- for him -- were
joky incidents: red tops to the towers and other passages of intense colour.
But his knights on romantic quests, confounded by enchantresses,
joky and amorous, seem somewhat apart from all this.
Hitchcock himself expressed uneasiness about Mark in his characteristically
joky trailer (he is tender and caring but also dark and menacing), and the attitude deducible from the evidence of the film is markedly ambivalent.
(Alliteration in Oliver's poem turns out to be loopy: dreamy and
joky and lacy.) The poem had been a great success in England.
Auster a beau parsemer ses recits de dins d'oeil, pirouettes et faceties postmodernes [Auster is much less subversive, much more classical than a Barth or a Coover; in vain Auster sprinkles his stories with winks, pirouettes, and
joky hints of the postmodern]" (156).
