Name this paragraph

[billmccloskey]

I'm reading this and have to share.

2 points if you know the source ( try not and reveal the source too quickly for those that know. Maybe a "I know." rather than a reveal.)

10 points if you can fathom what it means and why it was written the way it was. All can participate here:

"You are flirting with disaster if you take one second longer for your routine than you would be allowed under top promagnetic personality is sufficiently strong to interest an audience for long periods of time. That's the way YOU think. That's the fessional direction. Of course, I know that you are certain your way everybody thinks. But it isn't the way an audience thinks. "

[Bill McFadden]

Joel Bauer?

[billmccloskey]

I guess I'll have to give a hint. This was written by a former writer for Genii.

[Chas Nigh]

Darriel Fitzkee?

[billmccloskey]

We have a winner. Yes the author is Dariel Fitzkee from Showmanship for Magicians. 4th edition. I'm assuming this paragraph made it through 3 other editions in tact.

I read that paragraph over and over and over trying to pry some sense out of it. Actually Showmanship has a lot of such paragraphs that refuse to parse no matter how much you look at them.

At first you think the typesetter messed up. But then you are brought up short with a line like: "Of course, I know that you are certain your way everybody thinks." which is such a strange way of saying that line.

[El Mystico]

"You are flirting with disaster if you take one second longer for your routine than you would be allowed under top professional direction. Of course, I know that you are certain your magnetic personality is sufficiently strong to interest an audience for long periods of time. That's the way YOU think. That's the way everybody thinks. But it isn't the way an audience thinks."

It's just a couple of bits the wrong way round. But, yes, interesting that it went through three editions wrong.

Mind you, I've got a copy of Mervyn Peake's fabulous "Letters to a Lost Uncle", which has been professionally published a number of times, and one page is in the wrong place, and, I think, has been ever since first publication.

[billmccloskey]

Thanks for re-arranging Mystico: did you do that yourself or was it fixed in another edition?

[El Mystico]

It was all my own work.

[Jonathan Townsend]

My grandmother was a proofreader and such things just get out my pen/pencil when I come across them. When reading that book I filtered out the "you" stuff and left the notion "don't linger in our economy of attention". If you are an active reader with an eye on grammar, tone, presuppositions and such you can have quite the time of it in many magicshop texts.

As advised by one of the NY coin guys (whose minion informs me that they don't wish to be named in my posts) and in consonance with John Ramsay's advice on seeing other magicians perform: it's useful to explore the opinions of others in context as their reports of success can guide, their reports of failures can warn and their unfounded assertions may point to areas of profitable exploration.

[Pete McCabe]

It reads like the kind of thing that was in a PDF in two columns and was copied across columns and then pasted into the body. My point is that Fitzkee was way ahead of his time working with PDFs long before they were invented.