Word: classing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...problems begin with the choice of material. Cheever's best stories are not merely chronicles of upper-middle-class life, but Kafkaesque tragedies about what happens when a rigorously ordered world starts to go mad. Instead of dramatizing tales from the two major Cheever story collections, The Enormous Radio and The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, PBS has selected trifles from The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. These are then stretched out to fill an hour each...
...bank executive, who vexes his wife (Kathryn Walker) by jumping over furniture at cocktail parties. Not content to let this conceit speak for it self, Playwright Gurney supplies dialogue to explain that the hero is "surmounting the obstacles of middle age . . . [by] leaping above the paraphernalia of middle-class life." In The Five-Forty-Eight, a dance of death between a married man (Laurence Luckinbill) and his jilted lover (Mary Beth Hurt), the story's psycho logical suspense is gutted by a string of clumsy nightmare and flashback sequences. Were it not for the fine, anguished performances of Murphy...
...Just like that, so that they wouldn't get un derfoot." The blind men's songs had not been passed by the censor. "Mighty deeds were being done there," he adds with fu rious sarcasm. "Complete collectivization was under way, they had destroyed ku laks as a class, and here were these blind men, walking around singing songs of dubious content." Shostakovich vows that some day, the people who were respon sible for this and similar "evil deeds" will be brought to account, if only before their descendants. "If I didn't believe in that completely, life...
With growing apprehension, he read the outpourings of the New Left as they castigated U.S. democracy as a sham, belittled middle-class values and began to compare "Amerika" to Nazi Germany...
...with statistics as with words. Politics seems more and more a game played with percentages turned up by pollsters, and economics a learned babble of ciphers and indexes that few people can translate and apparently nobody can control. Modern civilization, in sum, has begun to resemble an interminable arithmetic class in which, as Carl Sandburg put it, "numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head...