Word: mode
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...think he will get the group in a happier mode," says junior Co-Captain Caroline Young. "He will make it fun first. It lost all of its fun last year...
Singer's fictional world has long consisted of three main realms, and this volume is divided pretty much equally among them. Eight stories are set in Polish villages or provincial small towns, where everyone knows everyone else's business and gossip is the preferred mode of entertainment. "There were no secrets in Krashnik," says the narrator of The Image. "People peered into keyholes and listened behind doors." Thus when the marriage between a village beauty and a bright yeshiva boy remains stubbornly unconsummated, the odd reason why cannot long escape becoming common knowledge. As before, Singer's tales of rural...
This linguistic paella, a free-form blend of Spanish and English, is popularly known as Spanglish. It is becoming an increasingly common conversational mode in areas with heavy concentrations of Hispanic immigrants, especially California, the Gulf Coast and New York City. The informal acceptance of this hybrid reflects the fact that in those areas Spanish has become more than a foreign language though still less than a second language...
...second mode is eclectic quotation from the image-haze, like a distracted viewer spinning the TV dial. Its leading practitioner in the U.S., among those born after 1950, is David Salle, 32. His main compositional device, putting emblems over a tangle of "transparent" figures, came straight from late Francis Picabia and perhaps from Salle's German contemporary Sigmar Polke. There is also a strong debt to earlier James Rosenquist. Salle draws, or rather traces, awkwardly and flatly. His imagery mimics the nullifying influence of TV, its promotion of derisive inertia as the hip way of seeing. Underneath, a congealed eroticism...
...scenes on the gritty sidewalks of Manhattan allow Berger to find a more congenially savage mode, incorporating an authentic urban snarl into his impeccable diction. His hapless narrator enjoys perfect security by disguising himself as a wino ("That there is no effective form of defense against a derelict is an irreducible truth of city life"). Even the deposed Prince of Saint Sebastian hustles a string of personal appearances, with the Firm as his agent. But these passages make up a mere fraction of the book. As for the rest, one can only agree with a neighborhood hooker who unburdens herself...