Word: frothed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nature, to be sure, the voice of local pride always tends to reek of too much protest. And professional sloganeering is only the froth on the sea of real, continuing chauvinism. The parochial boast occurs everywhere, and its inspiration can be anything: a product, a geographical feature, the weather (good or bad), even notoriety. Many a place, in the Dodge City tradition, has nurtured its morale on a reputation for meanness: Harlan County, Ky., is famous for little else. Arizona hymns its dry air; Louisiana often builds a brag on its murderous humidity. Amarillo, Texas, brags about its yellow dust...
Levine's short muscular lines capture not just the sense of loss but also the wonder that loss antedates. Oddly, the memory dodges bathos and becomes elegiac. A grown man retraces the field where he once hacked away at milkweed plants, and sees "a froth of seeds" from the plants' descendants drifting by. Another sojourner in the past thinks of Detroit (where Levine, 51, was born), and then of snow; he translates it into the tears of souls lost and gone to heaven: and given their choice chose then to return to earth, to lay their great pale...
...Elkin's Heaven? A celestial froth of every storybook cliché. It is a theme park of pearly gates, angels with harps, ambrosia, manna, a Heavenly choir that sings, "Oh dem golden slippers" and a St. Peter who answers a would-be club member's wonderment with a snobby "We like it." Peter is not entirely accurate. There are lonely child musicians whom God has untimely plucked because he likes a tune now and then. And there are tensions in the best of families...
...showpiece aria in the book--like a disco cruiser hoping to score; William Walton at one point debases Eisenstein to use Steve Martin's "wild and crazy guy" line; and Mary Ann Martini gives Prince Orlofsky a German-accented sadism that's hard to take along with Strauss's froth...
...provocative to be entirely laughed away. Wagner deals with this dilemma by switching her tone from scene to scene, almost always without warning. Embarrassingly enough, the sentimental moments are far funnier than Wagner's wisecracks about Southern California mores. The suds are soon indistinguishable from the froth, 'and Moment by Moment be comes a tidal wave of inanity...