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First published January 1, 1984
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 26, 2009
I'm only a little bit of the way through but I'm totally in love with this book...
This is a rare gem, a brilliant recommendation from a friend. Like most people I'd never even heard of her. She wrote amazingly witty, wise and pungently sarcastic (as well as somehow generous and healthily spirited) parodies on all manner of people and all manner of topics: political idiocy, legislative constipation, dictatorial vainglory, neurotic business mores, gender relations, impossible crushes on the opposite sex, literary and cinematic gender condescension, all her parodies are vivisection's done as if through some kind of eminently, uniquely seductive code- spot on in tone and target.
She's the modern (70's, 80's era) New Yorker equivalent of maybe....Dorothy Parker mixed with Barbara Kruger (Flannery O'Connor?, too, maybe? a little Jane Austen?) mixed with some of the more cerebral Franken and the bitter cocktail of Michael O'Donohue and Janine Garofalo. Let's throw in Jane Curtin and maybe a little Sarah Silverman, for good measure.....
You've maybe never read anything like this before but its guaranteed to be a delight.
She reminds me of the sort of style and substance of a lot of today's humor: often quite absurdist, deadpan, faux naive in some ways, a penchant for getting into the cracks and idiosyncrasies of different voices in pop culture to explode them, syntactically, from the inside of the discourse. Her ear was indeed amazingly well tuned to catch the hypocrisies and double think which seems soaked into so much of our communal language...naturally it becomes very surreal (and, go with me here, a little bit geometrical) which is all to the better if you ask me. But brevity is definitely the soul of wit and Geng knew it. Not very much contained herein is more than maybe 10 pages long, tops.
If you enjoy surreal, pointed, subversive, parodic, incisive, sneakily warm satire this is the gal for you. If only more people were hip to her. If only she were around today. If only I'd, like, met her at a party or something....*sigh*......
R.I.P.
This is a rare gem, a brilliant recommendation from a friend. Like most people I'd never even heard of her. She wrote amazingly witty, wise and pungently sarcastic (as well as somehow generous and healthily spirited) parodies on all manner of people and all manner of topics: political idiocy, legislative constipation, dictatorial vainglory, neurotic business mores, gender relations, impossible crushes on the opposite sex, literary and cinematic gender condescension, all her parodies are vivisection's done as if through some kind of eminently, uniquely seductive code- spot on in tone and target.
She's the modern (70's, 80's era) New Yorker equivalent of maybe....Dorothy Parker mixed with Barbara Kruger (Flannery O'Connor?, too, maybe? a little Jane Austen?) mixed with some of the more cerebral Franken and the bitter cocktail of Michael O'Donohue and Janine Garofalo. Let's throw in Jane Curtin and maybe a little Sarah Silverman, for good measure.....
You've maybe never read anything like this before but its guaranteed to be a delight.
She reminds me of the sort of style and substance of a lot of today's humor: often quite absurdist, deadpan, faux naive in some ways, a penchant for getting into the cracks and idiosyncrasies of different voices in pop culture to explode them, syntactically, from the inside of the discourse. Her ear was indeed amazingly well tuned to catch the hypocrisies and double think which seems soaked into so much of our communal language...naturally it becomes very surreal (and, go with me here, a little bit geometrical) which is all to the better if you ask me. But brevity is definitely the soul of wit and Geng knew it. Not very much contained herein is more than maybe 10 pages long, tops.
If you enjoy surreal, pointed, subversive, parodic, incisive, sneakily warm satire this is the gal for you. If only more people were hip to her. If only she were around today. If only I'd, like, met her at a party or something....*sigh*......
R.I.P.
Displaying 1 of 1 review