Word: idioms
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...fact as psychologically complex and possible as those of any novel. If they are considered simplistic, bare chains of events (Lancelot loves Gwenyver but she's married to his lord, Arthur), its's because modern readers and rewriters faced with the intricacy of Middle English have simplified the idiom to an extreme, ignored the subtleties in style and reduced the work to the lowest common denominator of its plot. In this shape, King Arthur is kid stuff...
Steinbeck has tried to feel the Arthurian apestry, not just to look at it from a distance. The Acts tries to re-weave the fabric of this legend in colorfast and pre-shrunk threads of modern idiom. Casting nostalgia aside, one must admit that any tapestry furnishing the room of a modern mind must be able to go in the wash, to be treated as something useable and abusable, not as a museum piece. Steinbeck has come a long way towards making Arthur wash...
Henry Miller knew how to get along with life, and the genius of his novels is that he also knew how to write in the idiom of getting along with life. That good old euphimism "the facts of life" is a more profound statement about sexual matters than those who generally resort to it would care to admit. Sex really is the single most unavoidable fact of human existence. If the total abandonment of Miller's men and women to the demands of their bodies, to all kinds of fucking and anything they can think of to go with...
Part of the problem in appreciating contemporary music undoubtedly stems from a lack of familiarity. A listener can't really connect a modern piece with an idiom of style in the same way that even an unknown Romantic or Classical composition can be identified as Romantic or Classical. For one thing, most people don't have a background or vocabulary of contemporary music to relate to contemporary music that they are hearing for the first time. And there is no real contemporary style; trends in modern music are scdivergent that familiarity with one school may be of little help...
...point for inquiry into the metaphysics of Beckett's later works, as well as Joyce's, but has remained only in the hands of critics, since it is long out of print. It possibly offers even more as an introduction to Beckett's ability to combine heightened abstraction and idiom in a comic synthesis (even in serious criticism). The essay begins: "The danger is in the neatness of identifications. The conception of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels out of the Teatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation of a carefully folded hamsandwich...