Word: epical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fellow employees of the Altra auto company to get a new-model family camper from the firm's Paris plant to an auto show at Amsterdam. They are waylaid on the highways by a seemingly endless variety of motorized misfortunes, ranging from an elementary flat tire to an epic collision. Oddly, most of the movie is so slow that it seems to have been enacted under water. Watching Hulot (Tati) trying to make his way through mazes of automobiles is a little like watching a wayward eel float through a fleet of submarines...
...ingenuity as well as a few "Ahs" for cleverness and learning. A few people would marvel (as they will anyway, and justly) at the great skill he shows in blending resonances from such things as the Divine Comedy, the Revelations of St. John and the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh with a story whose surfaces occasionally resemble All in the Family. Happily Gardner is on record as believing that a novelist should tolerate, even affirm the banal and the ordinary. "When Dickens wept over Little Nell," he says, "it was not because he was a subtle metaphysician. He mistook...
Rosen suggests that it is too late to do anything about the problem unless performers are allowed to bring back the scores and the great art of improvising. Ideally, they should have the abandon of the jazz saxophonist or the Serbian bard hatching his epic. Another solution, it might be added, would be luring composers from their suburban comfort to play their own music. Until then, he notes, one thing that can alleviate stage fright is "the absolute certainty of a botched performance." In coming upon a piano with a sticky pedal or a defective hammer action, says Rosen...
CAVELL STRUCTURES FOR ESSAY around his lesson in reading. His first chapter, "Words deals with the most fundamental aspects of approaching its Walden's meanings, its epic and religious conventions and the intensity of its expression. The second part, "Sentences," explores the way in which Thoreau's words work together to lead in into predictive conjecture. Their call to action challenges even our right passively to read them. "Portions," the third and final chapter, carries the reader from ". . . more or less formal question about the kind of book Walden is to matters more or less concerning its doctrine," that...
...invention of the horse-collar. But his artistic effectiveness derives mostly from his subtleties of form. As if the drama in his allegory "I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying," weren't sufficiently strong to express the dilemma of outmoded, outrageous American simplicity abroad, he invests it with a mock-epic structure, all the more sharply exposing his quiet American's hollowness...