Word: 19th
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like a hermit crab, John Updike inhabits old but serviceable forms: the novel, short story and light verse, the Christian church, a duly consecrated marriage (his second) and a 19th century Massachusetts farmhouse. Both the artist and the man have discovered the vital irritants and ironic satisfactions of the familiar and traditional. His body of work grows with impressive regularity. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a fixed star at The New Yorker. Yet many critics have called him irrelevant, accused him of having nothing to say and proffered the supreme lefthanded compliment...
Woodblock prints have become synonymous with Japanese art. Later Japanese Prints by Richard Illing (Phaidon; 64 pages; $9.95), an anthology of 65 examples (33 in color), surveys the vital 19th century tradition in which the print was produced and sold as a popular, commercial art form. Broadsheets celebrating the Kiabuki theater, courtesans, sumo wrestlers, samurai heroes, and witches and demons from Japanese folklore sold like rice cakes in the capital of Edo, now Tokyo. Yet despite their wide appeal, these prints were the work of master craftsmen who painstakingly carved up to a dozen separate blocks to produce one multicolored...
...first Jones's adoption of Marxism seems exceptional in the midwest of the '50s, the stomping grounds of Joe McCarthy. Yet the midwest, settled in the mid-19th century, at the height of Victorian optimism, has a history of utopian settlements. It was the scene of American capitalism's first unimpeded development, and seems particularly capable of inspiring a revulsion towards America: the land is flat, the culture traditional, functional, bland. T.S. Eliot felt this alienation, and the tone of "The Waste Land" owes much to his native midwest. Jones, too, must have felt it, for his church is above...
...Wave, a middle-class lawyer is afflicted by sleep-splitting precognitive visions of approaching apocalypse. In Caddie, a young mother leaves her philandering husband and struggles to keep herself and her children alive as she descends into a Dickensian lower-class world. In The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, a 19th century black man is finally maddened by the mindless cruelty and patronization of the dominant group and goes on a murderous rampage...
...quite a different plane is Last Wave Director Peter Weir's earlier Picnic at Hanging Rock. Though not scheduled for the New York festival, it is a haunting re-creation of a true incident in 19th century Australian history, in which some schoolgirls disappear from an outback outing, never to be seen again, and with no satisfactory explanation for their disappearance ever discovered. Weir creates an oppressive atmosphere, a compound of heat, isolation and sexual innuendo that is quite singular. His skill at wringing terror out of emptiness and silence, his sense of the fragility and smallness of Europeans cast...