Word: ciardi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Limericks: Too Gross (Norton, $7.95 hardcover). Asimov the poetaster and John Ciardi the poet might seem like an odd couple. But the two, who first met at a writers' conference, are close friends. They are also competitors and over the past several years have tried, with limited success, to top each other at composing limericks. The result of their 1978 Shootout is a book in which each offers 144 of the five-liners. One of Ciardi's milder offerings reads: "Said a voice from the back of the car,/ 'Young man, I don't know...
...other people in their 30s, anxious not to be considered square. After all, they see the same swingy plays and movies as everyone else; they read the same magazine articles earnestly explaining how the multitudes have abandoned the old taboos. So one from Column A (Carmine Ciardi) and one from Column B (Lynne Lipton) feel a certain social obligation to try mate swapping...
...more hang-backish - or hung-uppish. But it is Lynne Lipton who precipitates the movie's sketch-sized dramatic crisis. How, she inquires, can she have an affair with a man whose wife has been such a good sport about losing at strip hide-and-go-seek? Ciardi sulks, then has a mystical experience in which one of the heavenly host informs him that, up there, adultery ranks with crimes like parking in a loading zone. Thus reassured, the couple almost manages to do the fashionable thing - only to be defeated by guilt and one of those summer-house...
...exquisite blink in an automaton pirate's eye, with lifelike eyelashes and wrinkles on his skin, or the marvel of transparent ghosts dancing around a huge hall, to the vulgar ride through darkest Africa, with your guide shooting at rhinos, hippos, and elephants. One can agree with John Ciardi's estimation of the place is seeing the "shyster in the bacroom of illusion, diluting his witches brew with tapwater, while all his gnomes worked frantically to design gaudier and gaudier designs for the mess." Or one an simply realize that all this does cost to great deal, 128 million roughly...