Word: dialectical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Amis' outsize aptitude for mimicry runs rampant in What Happened to Me on My Holiday. It is written entirely in a dialect that sounds like some form of New Yorkese ("We grabbed zum lunj and then went oud to Lang Island in a big goach galled the Jidney"). Not for the starchy or easily offended, these exercises in absurdity showcase Amis' extravagant talents and splashy intellect. But we must also say that a little Heavy Water goes a long...
...also the feistiest roles. Childless Hanna-Leah, the butcher's wife, is freed from disappointment by an ecstatic vision and demands that her husband share the housework. Faygela, poet-mother of five, travels to Warsaw, where she encounters a circle of secular Jewish intellectuals and renounces Yiddish as "the dialect of garlic." Years later, one of Faygela's daughters converts to the new heresies of Darwin and Marx, and is arrested for distributing radical pamphlets. Another daughter interprets Little Red Riding Hood as a unionist parable: "She goes on strike, and the big, bad boss has no choice...
...Shakespeare in Love boldly imagines young Will, played by Joseph Fiennes, struggling with writer's block and a script called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, until he falls in love with Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), who becomes his Juliet. Fact weaves with fantasy, verse with demotic dialect, low comedy with high passion; and as director John Madden puts it, "Who dares put words in Shakespeare's mouth and get away with it?" The answer is Stoppard, who says, "It never occurred to me to worry about Shakespeare's language butting up against mine...
...Atlanta, down through the bustling business district and into the slums with one seamless narrative. Current trends and ideas are summarized with pithy aphorisms: Exercise-crazed women become "Boys with Breasts" and get-rich-quick schemes induce "The Aha! Phenomenon." Wolfe entertains readers with his keen ear for dialect and penchant for Dickensian names like Armholster, Peepgass and Armentrout. And of course, when it comes to clothes, who but a dandy like Wolfe would note the difference between a twist-weave suit and a hard-finished worsted...
...they feel like living in the late twentieth-century, media saturation, electronically-accelerated culture, etc etc. And so each person came back at me with all this kind of wild stuff. I mean Mariko came back with a Buddhist mantra psalm of a two thousand-year-old Japanese dialect. Or Julia Scher came back with a spoken word piece about engineering for the environment. So to make a long story short, you can have Julia Scher from MIT sharing a space with someone from Wu-Tang Clan, or Mariko Mori, a conceptual artist singing a Buddhist mantra, skipping to Kool...