They were something similar to the shuffling of feet.
Looking back on this period, in one of the sketches in "Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me," a new collection of Teffi's writing, published by The New York Review of Books and edited by Robert Chandler and Anne Marie Jackson, Teffi writes that she feels "as if somebody had shuffled the pages of a diary, mixing up the tragic entries with stories so ridiculous that one can only shrug in disbelief".
Conceptually, it is akin to BS Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969), lovingly resurrected in 2008 by New Directions, or Marc Saporta's Composition No 1(1962), which received the app treatment from Visual Editions last year – but in those cases, the co-author, subordinate as they may be, is the reader, who ultimately shuffles the pages of the work themselves.
Picture a conversation with a provider in which you mention a past illness or concern and the provider does not have to shuffle the pages of a thick folder, looking for the relevant notes and findings -- an act that interrupts the discussion and perhaps even gets it off track.
Stoppard gallantly pressed on, and I have a vivid memory of him, desperate in the gathering dusk, frantically shuffling his precious pages and brandishing his cards, like a panicky magician whose tricks are blowing up in his face.
Expats with dubious pasts and presents have, of course, long shuffled through the pages of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and John le Carré.
Thursday was Bristol's turn to shuffle through the pages of our new issue inebriated and once again they didn't disappoint.
It looks like a cartoon, a cliché." He shuffled the pages and picked up another drawing.
Shuffle the pages together (it doesn't need to be anywhere near perfect).
"You can hear the feet shuffling and the page turning in those recordings.
