Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have turned our backs on love, on simple beauty and grace, on people and objects of substance. Like Lear we mistakenly embrace the shiny, the glossy, the plastic, the metallic--words and things that mean nothing to us when we are old. And we are all old in this 20th Century where death stands urinating in the corner, able to turn his fury on us in an instant...
...Modern Tradition: Twentieth Century Drawings and Watercolors, now at the MFA, is a dubious lumping together of the fragments and varied styles of 20th century art, of schools and schisms which recoil from the cohesion of a term like 'tradition...
...lived in a prologue is a canny, cultivated Jewish matriarch who looks back upon her life story as a relentless series of false starts. As Ariadne Arkady tells it, hers was the archetypal "womanly" existence destined for the girl child born to immigrant parents around the turn of the 20th century. Denied a college education by her doting but traditional father, she is matched to an accountant with a Sephardic pedigree and a prim nature that denies her sensuality through 40 years of marriage. Four children are born and bred amidst a welter of domesticities. Passions are expended...
Theologians like Hans Küng [Dec. 31] should have the candor to represent their 20th century rationalism as the discrete religion it is and not gratuitously attribute it to Jesus and the New Testament writers as their "real intent." Küng's human rights entitle him to freely expound his ideas as his own opinions. They do not allow him (or any of the rest of us) to falsely represent them as Roman Catholic doctrine...
...friends, and the hell with the rest." Novelist Carpenter knows better; the comedians' implicit longing for normality and humanity proves that. But Carpenter also knows that the simulacrum of love with which his comics are re warded is more than most people, leading their ad hoc, late 20th century lives, ever get. There is bite here, but no bitterness. The overall, and lasting, effect makes A Couple of Comedians an unusually literate and oddly touching novel about performers going through the sound stages of life. - Richard Schickel