Word: epical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...anything goes-as Burgess demonstrated three years ago in MF, a novel of contemporary incest based on an Algonquin Indian myth. In his latest offering, Napoleon Symphony, the author, who is also a serious composer, has reached for everything from kazoos to pipe organs. The result is a mock epic about the career of Napoleon Bonaparte that sometimes reads like Dickens, sometimes like Tennyson and Wordsworth, with an occasional gash of Gerard Manley Hopkins' gold-vermilion. "The last section of the book is written in the style of Henry James," Burgess explains without a trace of solemnity, "because Henry...
...film's funniest portions belong neither to Astaire nor Kelly nor to any of the meticulously choreographed clown scenes of the '50s. In clip after clip, they are outdone by unintentional comedy. The Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald epic Rose Marie (1936) offers the couple known to Hollywood as the Singing Capon and the Iron Butterfly in a Canadian Mountie scene that must be heard to be disbelieved. Even in the '40s, MGM knew that there were different strokes for different folks. Esther Williams could do them all, in a series of swimming-pool epics that for elaborate...
Dallas was the scene of epic tragedy, but the city has never possessed much of a tragic sense. It has tended to regard itself, somewhat defensively, as a bystander at a drama enacted by out siders. Still, even after more than ten years, there is a complicated fascination in watching the Dallas Theater Center's company replay the events of November 1963 before a Dallas audience...
Still, there's really no good reason for headlines about the transcripts' "epic story" or for the Judiciary Committee to pretend that they are a more significant document than, say, the Pentagon Papers. But then, Congress has been moving closer to Nixon's way of looking at things for awhile now. The most important account in the Judiciary Committee's bill of investigation, Nixon's "secret" bombing of Cambodia for three years, quietly dropped from their priority list a couple of weeks ago. Of course, if Congress cared as much about innocent people's lives as about electioneering dirty tricks...
...press, its unusually satisfactory coverage last week of what may really bean epic story--the whirlwind sweeping across Portugal--ought to have been enough to give it some sense of proportion. The new spirit of Portugal may be more relevant even to an impeachment inquiry than the transcripts are, because it is an inspiring example of a people trying to take government into their own hands--something the American people's elected representatives in Congress are shamefully reluctant to do. And the parallel goes further than that. Getting rid of Marcello Caetano and replacing him with Antonio de Spinola didn...