Word: oafishly
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...title is enough to make you weep. This is not an erotic manual or a behavioral study, nor is it a blue novel. A slight but charming romantic comedy is imprisoned here, shut off by an oafish handle from its natural audience of fairly sophisticated fiction readers and gift givers...
...title refers not to Castro's island but to an illiterate Hispanic drug dealer (De Niro) and his much cuddled, much cuffed adolescent son Teddy (Ralph Macchio, star of the movie The Karate Kid). Also on the scene are the father's oafish partner in crime (Burt Young, an Oscar nominee for Rocky) and assorted street-corner toughs, including a junkie playwright who has befriended and apparently seduced the boy, a would-be writer. For De Niro fans, the role of Cuba evokes what he does best in film: veering unnervingly between caressing affection and blind rage. Small wonder that...
...chivalric logic collapses, and masculinity itself becomes a horror--all rage and aggression and reptilian brain. Viet Nam changed American notions about the virtues of masculinity and femininity. In the '60s, during the great violence of the war, masculine power came to be subtly discredited in many circles as oafish and destructive. The heritage of the Enlightenment (the scientific method, progress, that dreamy Jeffersonian clarity of mind that told us all problems could be solved) now seemed drawn into a darker business. D.H. Lawrence once wrote that the essential American soul was "hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer...
What Martin believes in-and her book on children encompasses the full range of adult behavior as well-is that "we are all born ignorant and oafish," and it is the duty of all parents to teach their younger selves how to behave properly. The only way to do so, she says, is by providing a good example plus tireless nagging. "It takes 18 years of constant work to get [a child] into presentable enough shape so that a college will take him or her off your hands," she announces. The child must be taught not just to say thank...
Some of the same faces were there Saturday. I high-fived a Harvard comrade as large chunks of loose turf flew over my head. Two feet away, on oafish prep was scuffling with the Yale security guards, who had begun to realize the fertility of their presence...