Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...feels very sensitive, he says in Strong Opinions, about his lack of a natural vocabulary. He echoes what he said in the afterword to Lolita: My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English. He feels caught between Russian, for which he no longer has an audience, and English, which to him still feels "stiff and artificial," however brilliant his success with...
Mean Streets, justly so, because this brutal screeching vision of streetcorner life in Little Italy is as hard to ignore as a fire in the theater. Certaily this semi-biographical film is daring enough-Martin Scorsese toys with improvisational acting, extremely stylized directing and a dialogue built around an idiom of cliches, and so laid himself open to charges of amateurishness. But there is nothing naive about the feeling for conditioned response and social context in the characterizations here. Scorsese, Robert de Niro and others give the streets a searing energy, a rat's den's sense of confinement, that...
...military is now in such disgrace that even the Minister of Defense wears a business suit in public, rather than his general's uniform. Nonetheless, competent civilians still hesitate taking power, because they have long viewed participation in politics with distaste. In fact the Thai language uses the idiom "to play at politics" rather than "to go into politics." Thus even Sanya Dhamasakti, the popular civilian who has been temporary Prime Minister for the past three months, wants to return quickly to his job as rector of Bangkok's Thammasat University...
...characters are furiously trying to keep things from popping out of their skin. Their ping-pong verbal exchanges--all wrist-action--are fast and funny and ultimately uncommunicative. These people don't talk, they bounce word-pellets off each other. Everything ricochets with the angle of conditioned response, an idiom of cliche, more like music than words--a high-pitched constant background. Their tough, jabbing control in conversation speaks of boys who have grown up together, pulled farther apart and more jealous of each other as they go along. Indeed, we get a connecting sense throughout the film of what...
...much a sense of cold solidity about them. They give opinions rooted in one's own life an overburdening finality, and they ignore a dialogue essential to any genuine appreciation. Working apolegetically within these limitations, I would like to talk about two poets who have explored the contemporary meditative idiom and come up with radically different visions. Both are "visionary poets." That is, they create another world--a modern myth--only vaguely connected to this one, based on their personal consciousness and experience...