Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pushed over, by the twelve-tone style of Pierre Boulez, with whom he studied for a time. Mines, commissioned by Sadler's Wells and first performed there three years ago, partakes of some of the near-physical brutality associated with the twelve-tone style. Its story is a gothic horror tale: a trio of scoundrels murder an old man and are then brought to penance by a troupe of plague-infected actors who may or may not be ghosts. "I wanted to write a tough, violent piece," says Composer Bennett, and he succeeded. His large orchestra churns out great...
...approach it as if it were a long, pretentious art movie. It should be read passively, with a relaxed eye toward its techniques, composition, shifts in style. And there should be frequent trips to the popcorn machine. A cheerful open-mindedness is essential because, for all its gothic appurtenances, the novel is a free-swinging romp, a virtuoso performance by an urbane writer who exuberantly deploys a variety of literary tricks-and then plays tricks on the tricks...
...Francisco recently, Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph McGucken signed the final contracts to build an $8,000,000 replacement for the old, Gothic St. Mary's Cathedral, which burned to the ground in 1962. Much to his surprise, a group of priests and laymen objected to his plans for the cathedral, on the grounds that the money should be used instead for humanitarian projects such as low-cost housing for the poor. The protesters cited Pope Paul's encyclical Populorum Progressio and the Vatican Council's Constitution on the Church in the Modern World in arguing against...
...novels have regularly made the bestseller lists. The Gabriel Hounds ranks a cut below her earlier works, but it still offers her familiar, quick, neatly joined narrative and travel-poster background (Lebanon this time). There is also a crumbling castle for just the right touch of the gothic, and an anti-anti-hero who is restless, wealthy, athletic, loves poetry, and drives a white Porsche. With his help, the heroine invades the castle in search of an eccentric great-aunt and finds instead a dope-smuggling operation. The young lovers rout the criminals and head blissfully for the altar. Kismet...
Though it may have been absurd, there was nothing contemptible about the antiquarian passion that swept a good part of the British upper classes at the time, when architects like Sir George Gilbert Scott and A.W.N. Pugin were creating hundreds of Neo-Gothic churches and restorations throughout England, and Sir Charles Barry was faking the medieval Houses of Parliament. For a generous spirit like Morris, it was an easy step from saying that life once was beautiful to believing that it could and should be beautiful again...