Word: lyric
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Parable of the Monkey"--have nothing going for them and should be ditched on that count. The first is corny, the second ludicrous, the third irrelevant, the fourth bad, and the fifth incomprehensible. By way of compensation, I'd suggest that if ever a name deserved to light a lyric, "Ftatateeta" does; that Caesar and Rufio might voice their contradictory opinions of vengeance and clemency in song; and that Caesar might urge Cleopatra to be a proper queen likewise. As long as Drake doesn't appear overly concerned about the incongruity of Shavian speeches and standard musical comedy numbers...
...credit, there are several first-rate tunes and some pretty fair lyrics in Her First Roman. I like a number called "Rome" for both elements, especially the following lyric: "Rome: I long to be at her side, a groom with his day-old bride, trading my dusty sandals for a home." And "Many Young Men From Now" has the added virtue of relevance, not only to the show but to the original play and to Cleopatra as Shaw conceived her. Drake would do well, however, to drop such hack-work as (from a song called "The Wrong Man"): "The world...
COUPLES, by John Updike. One of America's most stylish novelists turns his lyric imagination loose on adultery and the search for salvation in a richly plotted story set in a New England small town...
...Sock it to me" is now used in a neutral sense as a catch-phrase on TV's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and is a common sight on bumper stickers and even political placards. Jazz (originally a copulative verb) and rock 'n' roll (from a blues lyric, "My baby rocks me with a steady roll") are other examples...
Middle-aged lyric poets, like middle-aged lovers, are somewhat of a contradiction in terms. There is unavoidable comic pathos when words of springtime frenzy clack through dentures and lips that taste of Geritol. But there is about them, also, a kind of Quixotic gallantry. British Novelist Anthony Burgess, 51, has caught these mixed vibrations in a funny and affecting portrait of the artist as a middle-aged...