Word: irena
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mellon Faculty Fellow in Comparative Literature Irena G. Gross taught a six-person seminar this fall on cross-cultural perceptions in travel literature, and said she "loved the opportunity to have direct contact with the students...
...eateries serving such traditional French fare as coq au vin, pot-au-feu and gigot. To others a bistro is merely a cafe with quick and simple food, much of it indistinguishable from California cuisine. Symbolic of the confusion is the representation in a new book, American Bistro, by Irena Chalmers and Friends (Contemporary; $35). Cited are Kansas City's high-style American Restaurant and the posh, pricey Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas. Even included is the Ballroom in Manhattan, known for its Spanish tapas. Everything, it seems, is in a name...
Thrust among them is a fictional couple, both, fittingly enough, students of social anthropology. Allan Archibald, a moneyed North Shore Wasp, witnesses the murder of the reporter and on a bet undertakes to write a scholarly paper about the Chicago underworld. Irena Giron, a brilliant but unworldly girl from the Polish ghetto "back of the yards," catastrophically encourages Allan to learn more about the style and ferocity of the syndicate. Organized Crimes is part political satire, part informal history, part rumination on the Depression, part love story between the rich boy poor in spirit and the poor girl rich...
...anitra (Venetian wheat pasta with poached duck) and baked spaghetti pie with cinnamon-flavored cream and eggs for dessert. Pasta cookbooks are churned out with dizzying regularity. Mostly written by Italians, they are generally excellent; for instance, Sicilian-descended Carlo Middione's new Pasta! Cooking It, Loving It (Irena Chalmers Cookbooks). Accessories for making pasta proliferate: drying machines, ravioli crimpers, cutting wheels, rolling pins, tomato presses, electric cheese graters and dies to make dozens of special shapes like creste di galli (cockscombs) and capelli di preti (small priests' hats...
While the characters are shallow, everything else reeks of over-kill. The sex scenes are unnecessarily explicit, and Schrader revels in giving us the gamut on perversion from bestiality and incest to kink and sado-masochism. Schrader also isn't much interested in generating suspense. When Irena suddenly wanders through a surreal Cajun bayou, the audience is too confused to be worried. Occasionally Schrader resorts to the cheap device of startling the viewer--something appears suddenly or moves when it shouldn't. All in all, Cat People is as imaginative as coitus interruptus--and about as subtle...