Word: epics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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HAYDN: THREE QUARTETS, OPUS 54 (Epic). The Juilliard String Quartet once again displays its unsurpassed exactness of intonation and joint attack as it makes each quartet a finely chiseled gem-all without sacrificing warmth or passion, as in the C Major Adagio, with its deep-voiced Hungarian lament under the dancing arabesques of the violin...
...sexual humor that derides the solemnity of love. Earth's characters are never cast as heroes: there is something slightly ludicrous about them all. That is not new, but Earth sustains those characters with exceptional force and conviction, as if he were trying to enlarge the ludicrous to epic proportions. "Where the hell else but in America," asks one of his characters, "could you have a cheerful nihilism?" Earth is a bit of a nihilist about the novel itself; he is convinced that it is a dying literary form...
...stodgy; the few magazines of comment were not widely circulated. "I do not know any problem in journalism," Luce said later, "which can be usefully isolated from the profoundest questions of man's fate." Yet, he allowed mischievously: "I am all for titillating trivialities. I am all for the epic touch. I could almost say that everything in TIME should be either titillating or epic or starkly, supercurtly factual...
TIME's blend of the epic and the titillating, its telling of news in terms of people, its belief that medicine, art, business, religion, education and many other aspects of everyday life that were largely ignored by the daily press were all newsworthy in themselves, made the magazine a success almost from the start. Most important of all was its founders' guiding concept that the newspaperman's sacrosanct "objectivity" was a myth. Asked once why TIME did not present "two sides to a story," Luce replied: "Are there not more likely to be three sides or 30 sides...
...Million Years B.C. is a gaudier and bawdier copy of a prehistoric (1940) Hollywood epic about life at the yawn of prehistoric mankind. This time it is in color by DeLuxe, but once again, the sound track consists of groan-up dialogue that could have been prerecorded at a pet shop. Just as in the original, the special-effects man creates a table-top monster rally that comes to a clumsy climax in a duel between a triceratops and an allosaurus-the least exciting rematch since the second Clay-Liston fight...