Word: adler
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...very simple for young writers to emphasize style in a way that excludes social content. It is very simple for them to copy the slick New York Establishment--Mailer, Updike, Barthelme, Adler, and so on. I am not advocating a reductionist "socialist realism." I am advocating a transcending of solipsistic subjectivity. I am advocating a thoughtful search for a style that will encourage understanding of the political choices that face us daily. So, as a literary critic, I find Attanasio's piece unoriginal, everly self-conscious, slick...
...record the preparations in a funny, breezy documentary, Opening NightThe Making of an Opera. The camera roams in wig shops and rehearsal rooms, where Baritone Norman Mittelman after fluffing a line complains that the composer wrote it wrong. At the shaky dress rehearsal Kurt Herbert Adler, 75, the company's director, notes, at that late hour, that the chorus is posi tioned so that ticketholders on the right cannot see the action in a big scene...
Pavarotti arrives at the administrative offices swathed in desert robes. He strokes the astonished Adler's hair affectionately and then drinks the director's coffee. When he protests, Pavarotti says mildly that it is his coffee. The stage, the opera, the fans are his coffee too, and he knows it. He is in superb voice. Adler murmurs, "When Pavarotti sings like this, a compliment is not enough...
...time Adler embraced Aquinas' proof, then for decades he thought it did not work because although everything in the universe is contingent, nothing ceases to exist absolutely (e.g. burning wood only changes form), so no God is needed to explain the existence of contingent things. Last May he suddenly changed his mind again after applying the "possible worlds" approach. Adler speculated that the universe is only one of many possible universes, any of which -including this actual universe-can just as easily not exist as exist. The universe is "radically contingent," the only thing capable of not existing...
Other scholars use what could be called the cumulative argument: they contemplate the comparative plausibility of various arguments and evidences using Adler's favored standard of judgment, the jury's proof "beyond a reasonable doubt." This permits atheists to avoid having to disprove God absolutely, which is as hard to do as prove his existence, and lets theists cite human phenomena that strict empiricism used to rule out. In The Existence of God (Oxford; $37.50), Richard Swinburne of England's Keele University concludes: "The experience of so many men in their moments of religious vision corroborates what...