Word: conscious
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...another Salesman, for Miller is ever experimenting in method--while Williams' plays run in the same rut. (I seem to be using Williams as a whipping boy, but the comparison is inevitable since they are at the moment the two most respected and talked-about of our native playwrights.) Conscious of the weight of classical Greek drama behind him, Miller here has purposely moved closer to it and away from realism. He employs a lawyer, Alfieri, in a double role: as a temperately counseling participant in the action; and as an outside narrator or commentator (like the Greek chorus...
...Mercury were on the skids, and from 1933 until his 1948 stroke, he busied himself mainly with reminiscence (Newspaper Days) and scholarship (supplements to The American Language). Author Angoff skirts his lasting impact. Mencken, who detested democracy, ironically democratized U.S. life and art. He made Babbitt-land so culture-conscious that Babbitt disappeared. He lampooned frauds in high places so lustily that no public figure has been sacrosanct since. Partly because of his blasts at the prissy genteel tradition, much of American fiction became as unblinkingly honest as fact. His vitality seems to have been reasserted with his death early...
Rock 'n' roll is based on Negro blues, but in a self-conscious style which underlines the primitive qualities of the blues with malice, aforethought. Characteristics: an unrelenting, socking syncopation that sounds like a bull whip; a choleric saxophone honking mating-call sounds; an electric guitar turned up so loud that its sound shatters and splits; a vocal group that shudders and exercises violently to the beat while roughly chanting either a near-nonsense phrase or a moronic lyric in hillbilly idiom...
...nation's most influential art teachers likes to fling these fighting words into the teeth of the abstract-expressionist storm. Josef Albers, chairman of the design department at Yale, clearly deplores self-expression of the big, drippy, half-conscious sort made chic by Jackson Pollock & Co. "What we need is less expression and more visualization," he says. "I try to teach my students to visualize...
...Bamba Appassionata" (Passionate Doll). Somehow Wanda gets thrown into proximity with a secretary who advises her that "To dream is to live!", and then a moving van, and then many pseudo-Arabs and neo-Moorish hordes, and, finally, the White Sheik's own secluded sail boat. In her semi-conscious wake her distressed husband similarly encounters many adventures including the shower she had left running in making her get-away, an irate concierage, imperturbable relatives, and an Italian galloping trombone band. In an air of intensified pseudo-coherence the couple reunites and, to the tone of widly churning music...