Word: canonicals
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...chief, the playwright also invented human nature. In this tome the self-styled "Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolater" offers play-by-play essays that are a humane hymn to Shakespeare's continuing relevance as our "mortal god." If he does not quite prove his tremendous thesis, the author of The Western Canon amiably excuses himself on the ground that "explaining Shakespeare is an infinite exercise; you will become exhausted long before the plays are emptied out." Bloom may feel spent after 745 pages, but his essays will energize readers to go right out and pick up--or see--a play...
...short on intellectual argument. This book left me full--full in an on-the-verge-of-vomiting way. Unfortunately, in appealing too heavily to the gospel of "sex sells," Rice destroys whatever critical exposure her actual writing might receive. Armand will either be condemned to the bowels of the Canon or, perhaps worse yet, become a favorite among the good-time patrons of "Playboy" and "Victoria's Secret," who actually do subscribe to both publications for the pictures...
...governor of the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes (and by the way, his real name is James Janos), it would seem to behoove them to get ready for something. Rough-and-tumble populism? Muscular, mustachioed libertarianism? Ross Perot in tights? Let's take a look at the Ventura canon...
With her baseline, and the other's baseness, this was a parody to lift any student's heart, delightful both in its irreverence to the canon and to the disregard it shows for the seriousness with which that canon is treated around these parts. In their overhaul of the Bard, the RSC may have come closer to the original Shakespearean experience than we usually get. On the outside chance that The Bard is turning in his grave, though, no one seems to feel too badly since he never seemed the type to lie flat and complacent in the first place...
...experience of having a crush on an artist, of tearing through all of a novelist's books or rapidly buying all of a musician's CDs--the aesthetic equivalent of downing a pint of Haagen-Dazs--only to find oneself still hungry, frustrated with the limits of a canon. In the case of an artist with famously lost, botched or unfinished works, this hunger can be particularly keen. I know, having recently been driven to buy a bootlegged CD of material recorded for Smile, the legendarily unfinished Beach Boys album that could have been the greatest pop record...