Word: idioms
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...first section of the book, a set of biblical tales retold, Kolakowski puts the original ambiguities into the Marxist-Leninist idiom. While this sounds reductionist, the effect is quite the reverse. Kolakowski is so faithful to and concerned with the problematic paradox of Hebraic legend that he exaggerates the difficulties to the point where, for sheer ambivalence, his tales rival even the parables of Kafka. Translated into the lingo of current ideological strife, the Old Testament acquires an applicability most have long given up suspecting. To take his own best illustration, Kolakowski turns the story of Jacob and Esau into...
CHAMBER MUSIC has a bad name. It is traditionally awarded the dubious distinction of being the most unappealing of classical idioms. Its very mention brings to mind visions of bewigged, thoroughly antique gentlemen lulling their audiences to sleep with the sickly whine of their violins. The recent chamber music "revival" is beginning to change all that: more and more chamber ensembles are playing to larger and larger audiences. And so it is that the newly formed Harvard Summer School Chamber Ensemble drew quite a crowd at its first recital at Sanders Theatre July 9. These young artists demonstrated the perpetual...
...canny observer has concluded without aid: that airports have grown less efficient, for example, or that the poor are more victimized by crime than the middle class. Specialization, abstraction and rhetorical overkill - all have made native wit afraid to show its face. Political candidates no longer employ the folk idiom in their speeches. Humorists rarely use the short, acute idiom of Lincoln, Twain - or a Hoosier caricaturist named Kin Hubbard. A pity. In the voice of Abe Martin, a wise old rustic, Hubbard once cracked: "Ther's some folks standin' behind the President that ought...
...self-destruction. But before their movement became the subject matter for ambitious "new journalists," the Beat Poets had already shaken the literary establishment by rejecting an academic formalism rooted in the poetry of Eliot and Pound. They replaced this sterile stuff with a free-wheeling experiential American poetic idiom inspired by the more cautious William Carlos Williams. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," with its Whitmanesque catalogues of the poet's own undeniably hellish experience, became a banner around which the new American poets rallied...
Those same realistic filmmakers whom Godard so consistently disparages are the ones working in a popular idiom. Admittedly, their active contribution is small, but they at least legitimize much radical activity. From them, Godard could learn the political virtue of beginning with an audience, not just a theory...