Word: life
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Joyless Omens. As the biographer describes Joyce's literary struggles, the book's only drawback appears: Ellmann is so busy correlating Joyce's life and work that he attempts no critical revaluation. He does not ask if Finnegans Wake is a masterpiece, or a monstrous jungle of word play. Nor does he ask whether Joyce's famed "interior monologue" really reveals anything, or whether T. S. Eliot was correct when he suggested that "it doesn't tell as much as some casual glance from outside often tells...
When Ulysses was published in 1922, it showed Joyce's matchless command of the English language and his finger on the tragicomic pulse of human life. If that life sometimes seemed tinged with an indefinable futility, it was because Joyce tried to construct a universe without God. In such a universe, superstition cast a spell. He saw coincidences as magic omens and tried to have all his books published on his birthday (Feb. 2). He wore a special ring to ward off blindness. He carried a picture of the 17th century Due de Joyeux (no kin) in his wallet...
...flickers between Convict Desai and Counselor Sharon, it is clear that there are flaws in Psychologist Pryor's penmanship. For one thing, what is apparently "the best state-run maximum-security penitentiary in the United States" has a social organization based squarely on the proposition that in prison life all sexuality, unless otherwise perverted, is homosexual. Also, as in any authoritarian society, there is an underground. At S.S.P.C. its leader is Roy Kinney, the "Inmate King," a man of considerable natural ability, convict boss of the hard cases in detention block...
Among the holdovers from last season, A Raisin in the Sun still casts its warm, affectionate illumination on Negro life on Chicago's South Side; La Plume de Ma Tante remains a vintage French revue; My Fair Lady and The Music Man head the musical comedy division...
...attacks the modern world by showing what it's like at its ludicrous best. Mon Oncle is, in fact, a magnificent series of satiric vignettes, and Tati's greatest achievement here is that of the director who catches in the subtlest and funniest touches the humor and charm of life...