Word: irishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY. Irish Playwright Sean O'Casey was offended by realistic theater, and in this blast at what he felt was wrong with Ireland, he turned his antic imagination loose. The players of the APA Repertory Company make it a rollicking, rumbustious piece of theater...
...members pass out hundreds of leaflets that read in part: "The whole nation, stirred to teeming excitement by his eloquence, has tingled in every polyglot branch: English and French, Irish and Italian, German and Polish, Hungarian and Japanese, black and white, Swede and Magyar, all have mouthed his name in ecstasy, flinging the wonderful sound to the blue God-given skies until the vastness of America roared." I like the idea of America roaring--America the big lion, roaring munching during its elections period. When is it that the American lion yawns...
...matters. The first idea is that the situation of American blacks is largely similar to that of other ethnic groups which have assimilated successfully into the majority culture. One senses in this book a tone of moral disapproval towards blacks who haven't acquired the civility of the rising Irish: if the poor of today could only become as self-respecting and self-reliant as the Irish were in their day, the "racial" problem would solve itself...
...vulgar Marxism. Black poverty, he feels, can be explained in terms of economic and sociological processes which are mainly internal to the ghetto rather than imposed from outside. Given this view, the vast changes which have transformed the American economy since the time when the Jews, Italians, and Irish were fighting their way up can be ignored: the rationalization and consolidation of once-marginal areas of economic activity need not be seen as closing off the traditional avenues to group advancement...
...tricks him into painting the Da Vinci forgery, the narrator complains that he has been tipped into a "maelstrom of false marcheses, mercenary Bergamese whores, slippery Italian counts, witless German art experts, villainous Peruvian generals, paranoiac harpies, spiteful Russian cats, specious Polish wizards, spying pigeons, nosy janitors and ambitious Irish cops." He is also completely immersed in the unquestionably sprightly, if unusually perverse, world of three painters-Benjamin Littleboy, Leo Faber and himself -all three who are struggling haplessly to deal with the vagaries of their art and of their lives...