Word: duplex
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...they all had bug-eyes twisted slightly toward the sides of their heads. They seemed unaware of this: The kids had thick glasses, and the smallest girl had light blue pixie glasses with sparkles in them. Behind the glasses her tremendous eyes seemed miles away.--Beside them in the duplex lived a lone man who watched television and gestured angrily at the government with the stump...
...began when Peter Benenson, a 31-year- old Berkeley mathematician, was way laid by as many as five attackers as he unloaded a car full of groceries at his home. Forcing Benenson to the back seat floor, three of the gang drove his car to the $250-a-month duplex apartment in Berkeley that Patricia shared with her fiance Steven Weed, 26, a graduate student in philosophy. A young white woman persuaded Weed to open the door so that she could report an auto accident; when he did, she and two black men barged...
Steve Benson, the protagonist in the brilliant The Duplex, once again serves as the focus of Bullins's work and as he skillfully juggles the novel's first and third person voices, Bullins leaves little doubt that he is Steve and that The Reluctant Rapist is his only slightly fictionalized autobiography. A picaresque tale of horror and beauty, failure and success, the novel begins with a street scene in Watts and in a series of flashbacks recalls Steve's--Bullins's life journey, a peregrination motivated by "the memory of the past, of his wasted years from where he came...
...most extraordinary project any American playwright has ever undertaken, a series of 20 full-length plays on the black experience in America that Bullins calls his "Twentieth Century Cycle." Comparing the five plays in the cycle already completed (In the Wine Time, In New England Winter, The Duplex, The Fabulous Miss Marie, and Home Boy) with The Reluctant Rapist it becomes painfully clear that there is no transitive law of genius between playwrights and novelists...
...emotionless rite has a permanently damaging effect on Steve's (and Bullins's) attitude towards women. Women are seen as sexual objects and survival of the male ego becomes dependent on crushing the female's. "You sonna bitch," Velma, the lonely housewife Steve seduces and mistreats in The Duplex, curses. "You're a sonna bitch," the first black woman he rapes in The Reluctant Rapist cries out as he defiles her. But instead of being offended by the epithets, he wears them boldly as though they were testimonials to his manliness. For Bullins the only law that operates between...