Michals depends a bit too heavily on charm, which stretches thin in the playfully sentimental texts scrawled around each image.
As Favret argues, almost all of the responses to Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark placed the narrator/Mary in the position of a sentimental heroine, while the text itself, with its fusion of sensibility and politics, actually does much to challenge that image.
The text also contains a sentimental correspondence with Woolton's old nanny.
Then it slowly occurs to you how frequently these strange texts -- in their sentimental pretensions and transparent self-deceptions, their careering emotional shifts and their impetuous paranoia; and, most profoundly, in their projection of these inner turmoils into external policy imperatives -- mirror the official course of governance in Richard Nixon's two administrations.
Their approach might be extended with review specific features which provide sentimental analysis and other statistics from the text.
But a less sentimental pressure for the appearance of incomplete texts comes from publishers, who find it increasingly hard to accept that death should remove a commercial asset from the balance sheet.
Amidst a dome awash in searchlights, sirens, and anxiogenic low drones, Herndon sampled sentimental voicemail messages, glitches, excerpts of sound theory text, and garbled communications.
In addition the text is peppered with allusions to popular sentimental novels such as The History of Eliza Warwick (1778) and The Platonic Marriage (1787), which critique their presentation of the heroine of feminine sensibility.
And the most recent pieces, by the gifted Olga Neuwirth ("Eleanor," which uses texts by Martin Luther King, Jr., and June Jordan and Tyshawn Soreyy ("Sentimental Shards," a nod to both John Adams and Duke Ellington) give a contemporary political focus to Zappa's anti-establishment rage.
And while the acerbic Mr. Rus does not seem the sentimental sort, many of his possessions come from friends: a text painting by the New York artist Jane Kaplowitz; an acid-tongued, acid-colored photo piece by Larry Johnson, a Los Angeles artist.
