Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...slips into sentimentality. "Hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased, these women of Brewster Place, hands on hips, straight-backed, round-bellied, high-behinded women" have no interest or time to be maudlin. In this first novel, Naylor also demonstrates a rare mastery of the Black idiom and a delicate sense of balance in her usage. Chronology, the anathema of many a more seasoned writer, is the building block of the novel. Flashbacks, recollections and some of the finest dream sequences in contemporary fiction, intermingle to make each story strikingly circular, each one returning to a face...
...Allen in 1971, when Washington began to fight back. To the citizens of Dallas, Allen came to be known as "Richard Nixon with a whistle." Both saw service with Whittier College's rugged football squad, the Poets, and just as Nixon habitually spoke of world calamities in the idiom of sports, Allen regularly referred to football games in terms of Armageddon. There were other similarities...
Elliott Carter: The Early Music (CRI). The cerebral composer has his roots in the folksy American idiom of Ives and Copland, as this disc surprisingly shows. Elgar: Violin Concerto (Deutsche Grammophon). Itzhak Perlman triumphs in Elgar's most restrained major work...
...such influences are melded into a wholly modernist idiom. Hodgkin does to the Indian miniature what Matisse did to Islamic decoration; the source is not simply quoted but transformed. The miniaturist's precision of edge and line is replaced by a fuzzy, affable kind of formal system-nursery-toy versions, almost, of the sphere, cube and cylinder, those intimidating Platonic solids of programmatic modernism. His pigment, however, has an extraordinary range of effect. His work sports in the transparency, density and sweet pastiness that only oil paint can give. Surfeited by color, twinkling with fields of dots (like enlarged...
Such missteps are rare. The bulk of the show-bulky indeed at three and a quarters' hours running time-is authoritative despite a setting and idiom which differ emphatically from the Shakespearean, the modern, or anything yet between the two. This Verona, though at times unsubtle suburban in tone, also glitters with an extra vagina sense of the exotic...