Word: epical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more Humphrey flashes back, trying to individualize the Renshaws, the more they seem to merge as a single literary convention, the official folk hero of latter-day Southern fiction: epic hunter, epic drinker, epic lecher, with the classic weakness for a maddening black girl down among the cabins. Humphrey is accomplished at what he does and is moved by his own myth. But he cannot surmount the clich...
Proud Flesh includes, however, one fine set piece of the absurd: the mock-epic failure of a farmer named Hugo to get his cotton to the town gin, in a truck with five bad tires (counting the spare), on a road monopolized by a brindled milch cow named Trixie. Here calculated excess works in the cause of comic relief, suggesting that the future of the Southern novel may belong to the tall tale rather than further variations on the gothic. Melvin Maddocks
...that Picasso is dead, his life achieves a fleeting equality with the massive profile of the work. Whatever the verdicts on Picasso's achievement may be (there could be no single judgment on his stupendous diversity), his life was epic. Who in our time has lived so fully and with such daemonic intensity? There are no candidates. "Painting," he once observed, "is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants." There is no way to guess on whom, if anyone, Picasso's now homeless dybbuk may next descend...
...about their installations in Cuba, they would "take some action -like activating the missiles -and force him to attack." The request seemed reasonable. The previous year, however, the Times had quashed its story in advance of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Publication in that case might have avoided an epic U.S. fiasco. In the missile situation, therefore, the Times made a counter-request. As Frankel tells it: "Will the President give his word that he will shed no blood and start no war during the period of our silence? The Commander-in-Chief perceives no affront in this arrogant demand...
...Complete Polonaises (Garrick Ohlsson, Angel; $11.98). Ohlsson, 25, is a big man (6 ft. 4 in., 240 Ibs.), with the requisite mass and muscle for epic works such as the Polonaise in A-Flat Major; yet he is a sensitive colorist. But maybe he ought to wait until he has a stomachache before he next records the gloomy C minor; his performance is positively joyful with the exuberance of his youthful talent...