Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bawdy judge with a balky wig, Rooney breathes lewd life into the traditional courtroom skit as he scoots down from the bench for a popeyed examination of Miller's aphrodisiacal legs. The role of the intermission bandit who hawks candy and salacious Parisian pictures is played with gruff and raffish comic aplomb by Sid Stone...
After many Edenic millenniums an "unfortunate cosmic pattern" breaks this lock and introduces cacophony and dissonance into the new world. Almost immediately the inhabitants display symptoms of the "Degenerative Disease," a bellicose assertion of ego against the grain of the common good. Life-spans, which had stretched to a thousand years, begin shrinking dramatically; natural fulfillment is replaced by restless desires and dissatisfactions. The Canopean overseers sadly change Rohanda's name to Shikasta, "the hurt, the damaged, the wounded one." The period of earth's recorded history is about to begin...
...whole, were superior to that of the oppressors." Such polemics alternate with passages of aching poignancy: "The lowest, the most downtrodden, the most miserable of Shikastans will watch the wind moving a plant, and smile; will plant a seed and watch it grow; will stand to watch the life of the clouds. Or lie pleasurably awake in the dark, hearing wind howl that cannot - not this time - harm him where he lies safe. This is where strength has always welled, irrepressibly, into every creature of Shikasta...
...they are endearing, almost toys for children. The children are heartbreaking now. In those times, the children of the Giants, the Natives' children, were each one born after such deliberation, such thought, each one chosen and from parents known to be the best. . . each with such a long life, time to grow, time to play, time to think, time to ripen their inner selves and grow fully into themselves. Now these delightful infants are born haphazardly, of any mating, any parents, treated well or ill as chance dictates, dying as easily as they are born, and dying anyway...
...upon are worth this huge effort. Still, his mastery of detail is superb. The story has its startling, bizarre touches: Gilmore's father, it seems, was the illegitimate son of Houdini. Gilmore himself remains a punk, though a moderately interesting one. He spent more than half of his life in jail, and, like other intelligent prisoners, had a routine. He could con intellectuals and other innocents on the outside who tend to be fascinated by violent criminals-literate ones-in the same way that Gladstone was fascinated by prostitutes. Gilmore used words like "tautologic" sometimes. He had a line...