Word: motif
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...annual Brandeis arts festival. Also represented: Composers Harold Shapero and Gunther Schuller, Jazzmen Charlie Mingus, Jimmy Giuffre and George Russell. Their efforts are now presented by Columbia on an album entitled Modern Jazz Concert. The selections range from Russell's blues-favored All About Rosie, "on a motif taken from an Alabama Negro children's song game," to Babbitt's lurching, jaggedly profiled twelve-tone piece...
Thurber chooses the comic motif, yet in this process presents to the reader's (perhaps subconscious) appetite a number of themes primary to our age. For Americans sex and war have replaced food and physical danger as cardinal concerns, and new symbols are needed to connote these fears. Thurber has answered with the rabbit myth...
...plumage was vivid and vulgar-a sport shirt with a palm-leaf motif, sometimes a tie with a bulb-breasted nude. His Stetson sat squarely on top of his head, a cigar grew out of the right corner of his mouth, and he glinted at the world through rimless, hexagonal glasses. Readers of Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express could spot him at a glance: he was "the loud American." For the past nine years he has swaggered regularly through the frontpage, one-column panel drawn by one of England's most popular cartoonists: urbane, grandly mustached Osbert Lancaster...
...National Convention in Madison Square Garden, to nominate Al Smith for President. The interval between represents a catastrophe in F.D.R.'s life out of which he forged a victory; it has thus all the contours of the classically beleaguered hero. In addition, Sunrise at Campobello offers the classic motif of external pressures, with F.D.R.'s imperious mother wanting her crippled son, by returning to Hyde Park, to put himself on the shelf, and with Louis McHenry Howe insisting that, as a man born for politics, he must still throw his own hat in the ring...
...Pantheon; $3.50), is based on the fact that the human comedy is seldom humane. British Novelist Francis King, 34, pitches his inhumane comedy on the rise and fall of a young Greek spiv of the postwar dead-beat generation. The book's larger theme is the old motif of American innocence v. European corruption. Reflected in the golden eye of a Mediterranean setting, what is sordid and depraved becomes corrosively hilarious. Spiro Polymerides is a sun-baked peasant Apollo. He is taken up by an arty, effeminate, high-minded official of a U.S. relief mission in Athens. To fiftyish...