Word: earlied
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Barthelme turns a parodist's ear to several deserving sources of modern noise. A mock scenario for a film in the manner of Antonioni blurs the line between significant ennui and utter vacuity: "Shot of nail kegs at construction site. Camera peers into keg, counts nails." A news story of four Bunnies, fired from the New York Playboy Club for losing their "Bunny image," provokes a case history: "Bitsy S., an attractive white female of 28, was admitted to Bellevue Hospital complaining that she could not find, physically locate, her own body...
...novel's dreary lives are redeemed in the telling. Bainbridge's ear catches the tang of Liverpudlian argot ("My word, we do look a bobby dazzler"). The sisters' petty quarrels are small excursions of humanity in straitened circumstances. When Rita learns that her churlish soldier is illiterate, her dismayed brain is soon assuaged by her emotions. "Dear God, she thought, running up the cobbled alleyway, if he was that unschooled, he would need her, he would want to hold her in his life." Bainbridge unwisely changes her novel into a standard shocker on the final pages...
...intuition about how much he can shock the audience without turning it off. Coming from a nation that reveres horses, he shrewdly placed a completely nude love scene-which might otherwise have caused a fuss-just before the boy's outrage on the horses. He also has an ear tuned to his audience's particular anxieties. He speaks of the modern struggle to live with ambiguities: the knowledge that any good course can be immediately opposed by another equally possible one. It is this constant weighing of trade-offs that forms Shaffer's conflicts. In Equus...
Back home, his first stage play was a resounding success in 1958. Five Finger Exercise was a taut rearrangement of that staple of British drama, the middle-class family turned into a pack of cannibals. His next work, the hit comedy double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye, did not appear until 1962. He is a slow, easily distracted writer. It took him six years to finish The Royal Hunt...
Ives' father George was a bandmaster and, until the flowering of his son's talent, Danbury's leading musical citizen. George rigged a contrivance (24 violin strings spread across a clothespress) that produced quarter tones. Determined to stretch his son's musical ear, he had him sing Swanee River in the key of E-flat while Dad accompanied in the key of C. Small wonder that Charles the composer would go on to use polytonality and polyrhythms long before those techniques emerged in the works of Stravinsky and other 20th century musical giants. As Composer Aaron...