Word: bums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Samuel Beckett is the victim of a bum rap. Everything that lends him academic eminence-the 1969 Nobel Prize, the scholarly exegeses of his plays and novels, even the famous dust-jacket photograph from which he stares like an eagle just slightly startled to find himself prematurely taxidermized-has also conspired to suggest that his plays have a savor too rarefied for the palates of most theatergoing mortals. It is true that in writing, staging and performance, his plays are ethereal, austere, elegiac, pioneering a dramatic form that whittles existence into essence. But this is to say only that Beckett...
Ironweed by William Kennedy. In the third novel set in his native Albany, the author traces a bum's progress through the late Depression and his old upstate New York haunts...
Hattie is tall, thin, gorgeous, Waspy, a Bloomingdale's commercial for poise. Her boyfriend is a married marketing exec who calls her "Beauty"; her mother is a trail-blazing career woman (Jo Henderson) who thinks Jean Harris got a bum rap. Janie is an underemployed writer, short, sad-eyed and Jewish, with an attitude problem ("Know what I resent? Just about everything!") and a rather complacent identity crisis ("I very badly want to be someone else without going to the trouble of changing myself). Her boyfriend Marty (Chip Zien) is a kidney specialist who looks like a Muppet rabbi...
...says, "I'm trying to prove that I can make it on my own." Indeed, he would rather bunk down in a concrete corner of a bus depot than check into any city shelter. "I went to one once, but there was nothing there but bums. I ain't no bum and it will never come to that. I'm a normal guy," Hanshaw says. "I just ain't got a home...
...hailstorm of bullets. It is this ferocity, plus the complementary fusillade of four-letter language (the commonest four-letter obscenity is, by conservative count, uttered 181 times), that originally won Scarface the poisonous X rating from the Motion Picture Association's ratings board. It was a bum rap and was overruled on appeal. Scarface is no fouler of mouth than Richard Pryor on a good day, and less graphic than the last three dozen splatter movies. It is a serious, often hilarious peek under the rock where nightmares strut in $800 suits and Armageddon lies around the next twist...