Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...metaphor for racial tension is perfect, full of challenging complexity, but it is perhaps better suited to free-ranging fiction than the limited documentary treatment it receives here. Two Men of Karamoja is ambitious enough, but the form itself does not allow Director Eugene S. Jones (who made the Viet Nam documentary, A Face of War) to work past the restrictions of chronology and penetrate the true heart of the matter. Documentaries must rely on what actually happens; a dramatic narrative only has to start there...
...more dimensions than they would provide without technological assistance. The prevailing notion is a retooling of Mary Shelley, en cumbered with dismal sex and heaping portions of grue. Limbs, entrails and corpses come whizzing over the heads of the audience, along with various bats and other creatures of horror fiction. As so often with Morrissey, the joke wears thin fast, destroyed by its own spareness of invention and crudity of spirit. The novelty of Frankenstein is that it was made under more elaborate commercial auspices than usual for the Warhol crowd, but this makes for only sur face differences. Morrissey...
...idea should not be lightly dismissed as a science-fiction daydream. O'Neill has impressive credentials, among them his conception of the colliding-beam storage ring principle, which has been used in the design of some of the world's most powerful particle accelerators. His scheme for space colonies was recently the subject of a day-long scientific meeting in Princeton, and will soon be discussed at length in the journal Physics Today. Basically, O'Neill proposes building completely self-contained space communities in the form of cylinders some 16 miles long and four miles in diameter...
Sacred Cow. The doctors were wrong, of course. But Burgess still works with the passionate speed of a condemned man. Right now he has three new novels in the works: an espionage thriller in a "super-James Bond vein," a biographical fiction based on his pianist father's musical career, and a novel devoted to Pope John XXIII, about whom Burgess, a strict English Catholic, is highly critical. Soon to be published is the third and concluding volume of the Enderby novels, the story of a poet who loses and then regains his creative gift, generally regarded...
Ironically, to Burgess, who carries high the torch of fiction's modernist tradition, the future of literary studies and serious reading looks bleak. "Nobody reads in the past any more," he grieves. "You can major in literature in America beginning with Hermann Hesse." (Burgess should know. He has spent most of the past five years teaching at Princeton and the City College of New York, though he now intends to devote himself full time to writing.) The author's exuberant pessimism extends to the course of democratic government, especially in his native England. His solution is for England...