Word: epigrams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...eight years, whose title, Something Real, is a cool bit of understatement. The record is so real -- so immediate -- that the feelings described in its ten songs become almost palpable. The rhythms swing easy and rock on request, but the tunes have lyrics so vivid that each becomes an epigram from a broken heart...
...accent to capture perfectly the character's well-meaning but provincial sobriety as well as his underlying lecherousness. And as society matron Aunt Augusta, Emma Laskin drawls each word with a terrifically contemptuous sneer; she may be the only actor on stage who can not only read a Wilde epigram but can squeeze a laugh out of it as well...
...protests, and of the generation, was . . .what? To challenge authority. To change the world. To announce itself: Power to the imagination! Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre declared the upheaval "the extension of the limits of the possible." At Columbia University, Mark Rudd, a scion of Corporate America, borrrowed an epigram from the street poet LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka): "Up against the wall, motherf*****, this is a stickup...
...called an "arch-artist" by George Bernard Shaw and "that sovereign of insufferables" by Ambrose Bierce. In The God of Mirrors, Oscar Wilde qualifies for both titles, reducing every crisis to an epigram. Some of them are prophetic. In Dorian Gray, "the bad will suffer. The good will be rewarded. That . . . is what fiction means." Some are merely contrary: "It is always an advantage not to have received a good education." As Wilde arcs over London, he decides that the difference between true love and caprice is that caprice lasts a little longer, and that is his undoing. His infatuation...
...fortunes, his adoption of Clara, his new romance and the completion of the monograph are rushed onstage in the final scenes, as if to emphasize the ironic conclusion: Job's "tragedy was that of the happy ending." That sort of throwaway irony seems worthier of an Oscar Wilde epigram than a meditation on a profound theme. The Book of Job has haunted writings as disparate as Mark Twain's novel The Mysterious Stranger, Robert Frost's verse drama A Masque of Reason and Archibald MacLeish's play J.B. It requires more than bursts...