Word: childhoods
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...grand-children of Twain and illegitimate sons of Hemingway who have come to confuse the simple sentence with literature and the monosyllable with wisdom--the crude words and rugged realism of men's magazines and college sophomores. This species of literature is dying along with the subconscious-childhood reverie. The new: Jack Kerouac's bastardization of the picar-esque tradition, the hipster vocabulary, the mystic meaningless words attached to a generation, where motion is meaning and stasis is death. (I do not speak here of the book clubs, circulating libraries, paperbounds, and imported brown-covered erotica; Henry Miller and Herman...
Firman Houghton (according to the credits, he "writes poetry and plays") contributes a series of five fair poems, devolving from fractured form and bird imagery to a chair-ridden poor cousin of Gerontion, grieving over his memories. The best of the five is a childhood recollection called "Rocker." (Four poems and two stories in Audience come from the childhood kettle of perceptive innocence...
...dissenters: Dr. Martin Grotjahn, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, who thinks that / Was a Teenage Werewolf, Blood of Dracula, etc. provide a means of "self-administered psychiatric therapy for America's adolescents.'' His cathartic argument: "Certain childhood anxieties never die. Fear of ghosts, fear of witches, fear of the dark, the sinister and the mysteriously terrible-these stay with the adolescent. There are three ways to overcome them: psychoanalysis, nightmares, and terror movies, [in which] old childhood anxieties are activated, given life and a form of objective reality...
...confessing to be confessing "to worm my way into the graces ... of society," 3) confessing that all the confessing is too mixed up with the drama of "self-presentation" to be deemed "true" confession. The book is an account of how Author O'Connor developed out of precocious childhood into a state of adult infantilism bordering on lunacy...
...blow to all his pride and hope was so terrible" that Verdi never forgot, never forgave it. Helped by a friendly patron, he buckled down to a period of remorseless study and composition. By 22 he had won his post as Busseto organist over violent opposition and married his childhood sweetheart, daughter of his patron. Their two children died in infancy, and wife Margherita followed them to the grave after only four years of marriage and just before her husband's first big success, the opera Nabucco...