Word: modernizations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...everyone was impressed. Dorothy Wellesley, writing to W.B. Yeats, said petulantly, "But Eliot, that man isn't modern. He wrings the past dry and pours the juice down the throats of those who are either too busy, or too creative to read as much as he does." "The juice of the past" isn't a bad description of the lifeblood of The Waste Land; but it was a past so disarranged--with the Buddha next to St. Augustine, and Ovid next to Wagner--that a reader felt thrust into a time machine of disorienting simultaneity. And the poem...
Lovers of poetry in the pre-Modernist era had been surviving on a thin diet of either Platonic idealism or a post-'90s "decadence," and it was felt that barbaric and businesslike America could not equal the sophistication of England. Eliot's vignettes of modern life (some sardonic, some elegiac), and his meditation on consciousness and its aridities, reclaimed for American poetry a terrain of close observation and complex intelligence that had seemed lost. The heartbreak under the poised irony of Eliot's work was not lost on his audience, who suddenly felt that in understanding Eliot, they understood themselves...
...when gifted auteurs like Scorsese, Altman, Coppola, De Palma and Malick ruled Hollywood. Their god was Orson Welles, who made the masterpiece Citizen Kane entirely without studio interference, and they too wanted to make the Great American Movie. But a year later, with Jaws, Spielberg changed the course of modern Hollywood history. Jaws was a hit of vast proportions, inspiring executives to go for the home run instead of the base hit. And it came out in the summer, a season the major studios had generally ceded to cheaper exploitation films. Within a few years, the Jaws model would inspire...
...GINSBERG (1927-1997) He emerged during the somnolent American 1950s as a bardic reincarnation of Walt Whitman. His incantatory, long-lined verses were styled not for parlor reading or classroom study but for public performances, featuring himself. He provided the music for the Beat Generation and a vision of modern malaise: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...
Spielberg's most important contribution to modern movies is his insight that there was an enormous audience to be created if old-style B-movie stories were made with A-level craftsmanship and enhanced with the latest developments in special effects. Consider such titles as Raiders of the Lost Ark and the other Indiana Jones movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Jurassic Park. Look also at the films he produced but didn't direct, like the Back to the Future series, Gremlins, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Twister. The story lines were the stuff of Saturday serials...