Word: children
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Less than Swiftian (though not without an occasional flicker of appeal) are Shapiro's modest proposals, which include raising the minimum age for drivers' licenses to at least 30, denying foreign travel to children unless granted as a privilege from their school, putting dissidents on reservations, and destroying all concepts of adolescence. He cannot be serious; yet one pokes vainly through Shapiro's overcooked simplifications for a scrap of wit or irony. Finding none, the reader concludes that To Abolish Children is little more than a late-middle-age temper tantrum...
...ABOLISH CHILDREN AND OTHER ESSAYS by Karl Shapiro. 288 pages. Quadrangle...
Edsel Margin III and Karl Shapiro agree with millions of other solidifying citizens that America is in the sticky clutches of its children. It makes these two men angry; it makes them nervous; it gives them sour stomachs...
...gentle verse that balanced war disillusionment with hope for a humane future. The conviction behind Shapiro's courage has long been that organized cultural activities subvert "the fine arts"; he sees the latest threat in a corrupting coalition of irresponsible youth and commercial clowns. In To Abolish Children, the title essay in his assortment of literary trade pieces wrapped around "a fragment of a novel in progress," Shapiro quakes about "these freewheeling organisms equipped with electric guitars." But his arguments are smothered by his indignation...
...reality film cannot reproduce. The meaning of great film exists ultimately not in the script mechanics but in the treatment of script mechanics by distinct camerawork and editing. All worthwhile analysis of film, however literary in appearance, must hinge on our own interpretation of already interpretive images. But, children of media, inured to psychedelia and fearful of "verbalization," we must in tackling the narrative film understand some distinctions of literary-dramatic form in order to understand this transcendence of the first levels of visual reality...