Word: lyricisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...masterpiece and is regularly taken for one, though its composition has the spottily grand look of an academic mistake. But the figure of Balthus's blond wife, hands stretched above her head, rising from the dark plateau into the zone of early-morning sun, is a prime lyric invention; and the color has a resonant, hallucinated distinctness that brings early Mird to mind. Balthus would eventually paint some of the best landscapes of his time. The pick of them, perhaps, is Larchant, 1939, with its luminous sheet of sky and its mellow, precise inter-lockings of building, field...
Gaye's sudden death is perhaps most disturbing seen against the sudden rebirth of his career. Like John Lennon, Gaye seemed to be beginning a third decade of musical influence. He translated "Let's Get it On" into "Sexual Healing," with the eighties touch apparent in the lyric, "Whenever blue teardrops are falling and my emotional stability is leaving me/There is someting I can do. I can get on the telephone and call you up baby." He added the strength of his new religion in the song "My Love is Waiting," and a sense of Third World struggles in "Third...
...been assumed that they used up the territories of the rural backwater and the prep school. Padgett Powell's twelve-year-old Simons Manigault is proof that they did not. He is in fact one of the most engaging fictional small fry ever to cry thief: sly, pungent, lyric, funny, and unlikely to be forgotten when literary-prize committees gather later in the year. Edisto (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 183 pages; $11.95) is an impressive first novel. Powell, 31, a Houston roofer, has all the literary equipment for a new career: a peeled eye, a tuning-fork...
...Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first published in 1939, is an extended lyric poem, and was the first appearance of "negritude" in print. In choosing the word, its creators had simply latinized the derogatory word for black in French (negre) and attached an augmentative suffix. Lacking in English ****equivalent, the term has no absolute definition. Cesaire chose to show negritude in relation to its negation so as to illustrate its strength...
...these guys. Kander's tunes have the catchy dissonance of a Broadway traffic snarl just before show time; violins cower mutely in the pit while the percussion sets a tempo of edgy energy and the horns bleat like Kurt Weill's orphaned children. Ebb never wrote a lyric as clawing as the imaginary one cited above, but he revels in devising anthems of urban indomitability. Everything that outsiders hate about New York City-its grime and pace, its inhabitants' steamroller pugnacity-Ebb sees as fodder for his romantic cynicism. If a Kander-Ebb song rarely reveals deeper...