Word: mythical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Nancy Hanks II from Savannah to Atlanta. Dozens of other great trains, such as the Twentieth Century Limited and the Phoebe Snow between Hoboken, N.J., and Chicago, had already vanished. What remains of rail service may become better than ever, as Amtrak promises rather unconvincingly, but the special mythic quality has been lost on the wind with the vanished steamers...
...dialogue, news flashes, commercial interruptions, sight gags and puns arranged to resemble an eccentric audio-visual TV script, The Sweetmeat Saga is a nicely transparent put-on about the disappearance of Pookie and Paul Sweetmeat, twin rock superstars of the '60s. In keeping with the author's mythic intent, Pookie and Paul never appear. As the subjects of a nation-stopping search, however, their presence is never in doubt...
Even for readers who have never read Levi-Strauss and think Algonquin legends are about Dorothy Parker, MF still works as a comic novel. It is not Burgess's best book because it is rather too schematic. The effort of dragging his mythic story into the 20th century has left the author with too little chance to flesh out his hero. Burgess is better remembered for characters like Enderby -decent, quirky men weathering the infirmities of the body and the indignities of the soul with awkward gallantry. By contrast, Miles Faber is a disappointment -nutty, knowledgeable, but finally...
...women, and images of women, have almost always dominated the product that emerged. The great mythic stars-those very useful icons that provide most of the depth of industry movies-are for the most part women. Big male stars (Gable and Bogart, Wayne, Cooper, and Grant) usually last longer in the front ranks, for all the obvious and repulsive reasons. But few of them ever provide the somewhat metaphysical definition of their movies: Bogart did-and Brando for a spell-and certainly John Wayne has defined the Western more than anyone, perhaps, except Ford and Hawks. Nevertheless, most great movie...
Gibson hits his peak as the star of Night Letters, a telephone participation show. Audience feedback creates a web of involvement and expands radio to almost mythic proportions. Spinning his dials and monitoring the tape delay device that censors callers' obscenities, Gibson is a McLuhan obfuscation made flesh-a benevolent witch doctor in an electronic village of the lonely, the sick and screwed...