Word: hardness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Roth's world is that of the nouveau riche and the pseudo-intellectual. His suburbanites struggle with the complexities of country clubs and housing developments; his professors, just out of Harvard or Columbia, are careful to pronounce Don Quixote with the hard X. None possess the depth or complexity of a Herzog. Roth sums it all up in my favorite image from his first novel, Letting Go (1962), when one sunny day the middle-aged Fay Silberman "goes outside their place in South Orange and her husband is being driven all over the lawn in their power mower...
...Even where efforts are being made to meet their demands, they are still unsatisfied. In some cases, uncompromising campus militants seem more interested in disorganizing college administrations than in reorganizing curriculums. Often, they are succeeding. And school authorities and government officials, for the most part, are taking an increasingly hard-line approach to the student rebels. Items: >At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, National Guardsmen were called in to restore order after black students and their allies had disrupted classes for three days. "The university will not be closed down," flatly declared Governor Warren P. Knowles, who first sent...
...music of my people." Opening the Philadelphia program with The Times They Are AChangin, she made Bob Dylan's classic folk tune sound like a revivalist hymn; yet she never lost any of its satiric bite. At the Metropolitan, Langston Hughes' Backlash Blues had an angular, hard-rock quality that pointed up its bitter message: "Do you think that all colored people are just second-class fools? /Mr. Backlash, I'm gonna leave you with the blues." Billy Taylor's / Wish I Knew was hand-clapping gospel at its best. Sample lyric: / wish. I knew...
...REQUEST A TIME AND PLACE with a phrase such as, "Hey, I've got a bone to pick with you." This avoids "Pearl Harbor" surprise attacks and makes the fight voluntary. To enforce persistence, Bach says, boats are ideal; they make it hard for either combatant to escape...
Anouilh has clearly touched on some important social problems, but he deals with them so superficially that it becomes hard to credit his sincerity. In Act Two the play shifts to Robespierre himself in the French Revolution and Anouilh goes on to caricature the man asserting at one point that Robespierre killed "because he couldn't succeed in growing up." The dangers that come along with the second generation of revolutionary leaders, who are generally more intolerant and uncompromising than the original leaders, are too serious to allow one to be happy at seeing them parodied in Anouilh's manner...