So, clearly, my real neighbor on my recent Aspen-Denver flight was not my fictional conceit of Mr. Smokepuff.
Colman Domingo, whose "Scottsboro" roles include a racist white sheriff, a vicious guard and an anti-Semitic attorney general, said that when he learned of the minstrel conceit, "my first reaction was, 'Really?' " But he said he came to see that "forcing these boys — these African-American men — to tell jokes and sing and tell their story makes it devastating".
While I was writing, I imagined that I was alone in my quest; the conceit was that I was going to practice for ten thousand hours, because nobody else my age would ever be willing to invest that kind of time.
It was an appropriation to suit my own poetic conceit, an insult to the delicacy of the real bird.
Almost incredibly, though, and much to my surprise, the conceit that his own self-inflicted woes might echo his mother's hardships actually comes across as genuine.
With acknowledgment to my own regional conceit, when I think of the Big East that was founded as a collective of basketball powers from Boston to D.C., I think Northeast.
In "Wild" and "Torch" and my personal essays, the conceit is that the readers are both there and not there.
I can't pretend to be big-headed, I just have to find my own big-headedness, conceit, arrogance, whatever it is compensating for his insecurities.
It was when a handgun began being brandished, mostly at the head of the cowering Jerome, sometimes begging for his life, that my patience with the conceit of "Modern Terrorism" began to wear thin.
