Word: goldman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...critic Goldman brilliantly conveys his reckoning of Bruce as a kind of artistic genius who falls outside of all high-brow categories. Bruce was a great stand-up comic, a vital master of the "spritz." But the "spritz" belongs in what is called "popular culture"; it is urban folk art. Bruce is an urban American primitive, a Jewish Leadbelly. And besides Goldman such folk art hasn't yet enlisted too many serious students. Goldman has staked out a new region that promises to be a "field of the future" among scholars and critics. Through his magazine articles and essays...
...musicians with whom he gigged, scored junk and shot up. He mined the radio shows and grade B movies of the thirties and forties to forge his early mordant satires. Finally, Bruce found his most comprehensive metaphor for human experience in the hustling world of show business itself. As Goldman reconstructs and distills the creative process, Bruce's greatest work would invariably pose the question...
...GOLDMAN RANGES over and explores all these cultural "influences" with a superb critical imagination. But he examines them directly and concretely in terms that bespeak familiarity rather than scholarly distance. And he discovers them embedded in the day-to-day encounters and imaginative responses that made up Bruce's life. Bruce's life, his work and days, not the order or development of Goldman's critical ideas, provide the chapter-by-chapter organization of Ladies and Gentlemen. The book proceeds as a reconstruction of that life out of masses of interviews and recollections. It draws as well on Goldman...
...only familiarity but self-knowledge and sympathetic imagination are among the ingredients of this outstanding biography and separate it from Goldman's earlier writing. Tracing the roots and reaches of Bruce's genius, he writes in a style charged with Bruce's own idiom and raging humor and amazingly achieves in print something approaching the same verbal energy. You cannot read his harrowing descriptions of Bruce's needle ravaged limbs or his raucously humorous passages describing Lenny's absurd, infantile and frequently brutal relationships without entering deeply into the man's experience...
...Goldman does thrust us inside the soul of Lenny Bruce and of scores of people who nurtured, cared for, lionized or harassed and preyed on him. He does so without in the least sanctifying Bruce himself, and he renders dignity and wholeness to people whom Bruce scorned. Goldman employs the same narrative techniques and extremities of diction, the verbal overkill, that characterize a faulted New Journalism, but he uses them with a measure of critical judgment, detached reflection and craft that others lack...