The tension between the desire for perfection and the need to live in a world in which perfection is impossible is a covert theme in the book, and Rees's frequent allusions to the analogous relationship between an imperfect pencil tip and an imperfect life seem both goofily ironic and utterly sincere.
Its plain, faux-naïf style, based in the folk and Protestant church-music idioms that Thomson drank in during his pre-First World War childhood, in Kansas City, Missouri, is at once completely ironic and utterly sincere; it tells a thoroughly American story with an originality of viewpoint that attains an international standard.
There's a comical cinema-centricity to "Gorgeous Girl," including a subplot involving a fanatical boy movie-maker (a sort of young-Truffaut surrogate in a cosseting household) and a plethora of on-screen movie in-references (including one ironic, bitter, and utterly apt one, in a jail cell, to Robert Bresson's "Pickpocket").
"Modest in tone, ironic, reflective, and utterly precise in its effects, this book is all of a piece," Rafferty wrote, "the proud result of a rigorous and exacting attention to standards — a novel that fulfills its author's intentions as flawlessly as a 'classic' short story from the college anthologies".
An Anohni win on Sunday would be beyond ironic, and so utterly timely and necessary.
Such ironic jeux d'esprit are utterly foreign to the old wives' tale.
Larkin's wearily ironic voice is an utterly devastating medium with which to deliver such a bleak and hopeless meditation on death, as terrible and beautiful and banal as mortality itself.
It is not a horror film; in fact its success makes the modern horror genre, with its evenly-spaced production-line shocks, crude soundtracks, and self-defeating ironic self-awareness, look utterly bankrupt.
But in All-Star, writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely strike exactly the tone that film-makers have missed: modern and clever without being snide or ironic, optimistic without naiveté, and, thanks especially to Quitely, utterly beautiful.
Which is all a bit ironic considering that Alzheimer's disease is, indirectly, the only reason I'm not utterly drowning right now.
