Word: life
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When Woody Allen takes a brave, unhesitating step forward, it is only to tumble through one of life's trap doors. He is a clown who pummels himself with his own pig bladder, an incarnation of the schlemiel, a born super-stupe...
This should be daft, glorious stuff, and West ought to lurch into life as a monstrously American folk villain, the match of such folk heroes as Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett. If Minnesota's lakes are the hoof-prints of Bunyan's blue ox, why can't Warren Harding, Al Capone and Joseph McCarthy be the droppings from Eddie West's cigar...
Food and sex. Sex and food. Chicken in coconut milk-vatapá-then a white night under the stars. These constitute life in the Brazilian state of Bahia, according to its most celebrated writer, Jorge Amado. They are also the fixed points in the remarkable history of his latest heroine, Dona Flor...
...really writing a love letter to Bahia. Formerly an earnest Communist, he turned out several stark novels (sample title: Sweat). Gabriela marked an abrupt mellowing in Amado's outlook. Now he romanticizes his Bahians into virile lovers, darkly sensual morenas, whores and neighbors, all larger than life. According to rumor, Dona Flor's friends are not the Bahian poor, but Amado's own circle of artists and intellectuals, whom he has costumed as peasants for a literary romp à clé. To that degree, Dona Flor is a long, savory inside joke. It is not, however, malicious...
...politics, as in much else, Shaw was often preposterous. One after the other, as the dictators appeared, he applauded Mussolini. Hitler and Stalin -in the no-nonsense manner of a Fabian socialist committee-on the grounds that they were cleaning up a mess. Such obtuseness in a man whose life is a record of devotion to decency in human life can be explained only as an aberration, perhaps a dramatist's occupational disability of putting his own words into the mouths of other characters. Lenin saw Shaw as "a good man fallen among Fabians." Shaw, perversely, seemed to regard...