There are riddles and digressions and repetitions.
It is a high-wire act that is sustained by what must be a remarkable memory as he shapes his story round complicated digressions and repetitions.
The soliloquies — sometimes surprisingly informed but often full of crackpot inventions — are delivered in mock-Elizabethan style by two wonderful actors, Anne Gridley and Robert M. Johanson, aided by discreet listening devices so that none of the pauses, reversals, nutty digressions and repetitions will be left out.
But if you think that our interest in movies has everything to do with our feelings about them, and if you have a tolerance for repetition, digression, first-person indulgence, and general narrative shagginess, then you are not likely to find a more affecting and intellectually absorbing book on film as a popular art.
Mainly, though, she was purposeful: a steady gaze; an orderly mind (she would often ask for "a second of focus" while collecting her thoughts, to fend off the sins of repetition and digression); and a tolerant, regretful sympathy for those around her whose heads were filled with idle thoughts or low-quality data.
As always in her shows, Ms. Smith draws her texts verbatim from interviews she conducted herself, including pauses, repetitions, digressions and the occasional interruption for a cup of coffee or a ringing phone — details that add to the verisimilitude of the testimony.
But I digress (from my digression).
The Discussion could also use editing to avoid repetitions and digressions into peripheral issues such as the evolutionary origins of B-1a B cell lineage, which are not directly addressed by the present data.
Inevitably, this timeline sometimes gets bent by digressions, which in turn means there's a risk of repetition, or catch-up writing, with some damage to the sense of narrative flow.
Duck Variations is also a fine example of where that writer's skills and interests would lie later in his career: the dialogue contains in prototype the heightened-naturalistic vernacular – repetitions, hesitations and digressions – that became his trademark.
