Word: literatureâ
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...perhaps because those masters flourished in simpler times, they were merely funny. Baker has taken newspaper humor a step further. He has turned it into literature???funny, but full of the pain and absurdity of the age. Those qualities probably keep a few readers away. Said an otherwise admiring Jack Rosenthal, assistant editor of the Times's editorial page, when asked to cite any deficiencies in the column: "Too serious...
...seem so. More often the doctrine has been propounded to excuse artistic self-indulgence, sheer gush, or at best the refined outpourings of private feeling. None of these excesses apply to Nabokov. Few writers have brought to the practice of art for art's sake?or indeed to thematic literature???the enormous talent and discipline, the overwhelming intellectual grasp, the scrupulously objective range of eye and ear that Nabokov commands...
...wraps a ribbon through the girl's hair. Harsh, disjointed architecture unsettles the scene. It is no longer important that Kitaj has combined figures from German and French anatomical discourses with an English pram. For him, this painting conjures up his native state and the curious syndrome in American literature???you can't go home again. His real subjects are violence, alienation, social misery and loneliness...
...such sure telling bits as: "The first lock, by Inglesham Round House, holds two feet of water, of varnished and translucent brown?the brown of old sherry." Though we are here reminded that Elder Brother Morley is prouder of his taste in wine than of his taste in literature???which he takes for granted?the Thames wanderings of Younger Brother Morley are as rich and heady as though the water were turned into brown old wine with the Wife of Bath's passing. An apparently genuine "treasure cipher," its decipherment and what ensued give to the tale an almost spirituous...
...what he is trying to say, that he does not quite understand himself, that he is over-impressed by Freudian psychology and sex symbols, that he is overfond of dwelling on the pathological and perverted, that all this belongs in the medical laboratory rather than in the ranks of literature???that is my general opinion. However, I must say that I am frequently caught by what I do feel is, occasionally, a beautifully rhythmical style, and, at his unpleasantest, some times, a singularly moving power, as in I Want to Know Why, Brothers and many of the Wineburg, Ohio sketches...