Word: backwards
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...offer hilarious refutation. Excerpts from Stanley Elkin's The Dick Gibson Show and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint belong on the shelf with Rabelais and Swift. Woody Allen's The Kugelmass Episode stands as a classic. In it, a professor of humanities is propelled backward in time to the arms of Madame Bovary and the pages of a remedial Spanish textbook: "He was running for his life over a barren, rocky terrain as the word tener ('to have')-a large and hairy irregular verb-raced after him on its spindly legs...
...history, beginning with its somewhat shaky 1923 start under Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, when the first issue sold fewer than 9,000 copies. The program goes on to examine the origins of the Man of the Year and the phenomenon of early-years TIME style, with its backward-running sentences and punchy neologisms, like "tycoon" and "socialite," which are now part of everyday English. It even displays some of the cover stories that were canceled because of late-breaking news, such as a Jack Benny cover that was scrapped for Winston Churchill and the outbreak of World...
...know how to use movie archetypes to manipulate political loyalties. The Israeli prosecutor has the superior smile of a bureaucrat conquistador. The Palestinian is tall, thin, suntanned, nice to babies; and he has unflinching crystal blue eyes (would they lie to you?). And yet, the film bends over backward to seem fair to its swarm of social and personal ambiguities. The result is a well-meaning muddle that refuses to come alive. The pace is languid when it ought to fall into the march step of melodrama. Hanna K. does boast what may be a film first: an infant...
...imitate Satan, fools, saints and, on one occasion, a rooster. True, his gift has been squandered on a man with no redeeming features, but for once Singer is not out to charm his readers. He and his penitent seem content to prove the old Yiddish proverb "Going backward is still a form of travel...
...palls more quickly than its aural counterpart, and beside Adams' expanded vocabulary, Childs' monochromaticism looks dated. By definition, being a member of the avant-garde means always being in motion, like running up a down escalator: if you are not actively moving forward, you are surely moving backward. -By Michael Walsh