Word: odes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every character, great or small (and truth to tell, they're all small), has the juice of comic originality in him. In jail with Hi, one convict strums Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the old banjo. The bounty hunter -- he's real, not just a Hi dream -- is a demon road warrior, a warthog from hell who grenades rabbits and torches roadside flowers, can catch flies between his filthy fingers, and has a secret tattoo of Woody Woodpecker on his left pectoral. Gale and Evelle (lots of gender-bent names in this picture) lecture Ed on the importance...
...Moby Dick finds Humphrey in the Berkshire Hills of lower Massachusetts, resolved to take a 30-pounder in a sporting manner befitting its own dark nobility. In the fading light of the trout season's last day, with the strains of Beethoven's Ode to Joy still echoing down from the Tanglewood concert shed above, he finally hooks the great fish. But then...
...loveliest, most self-revealing story appears near the end. Birds of a Feather is an ode to the woodcock, that plucky, reclusive little game bird of the uplands. Preparatory to a hunt in upstate New York, Humphrey reads up on the bird. "He gets curiouser and curiouser. His brain is upside down. His ears are in front of his nose . . . Like the woodcock, I too am an odd bird; I know I am, and I would change if I could, because being odd is uncomfortable, but, no more than the woodcock can, I can't, not anymore...
...muddled along without an official poet laureate. This lack did not noticeably hinder the work of such natives as Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Frost and Robert Lowell. But it bothered Hawaiian Senator Spark Matsunaga, an avid reader and sometimes writer of poems, including one called Ode to a Traffic Light ("Impartial traffic cop/ That blushingly speeding cars do stop...
...Mona," another superior song, is a hilarious self-parody of Taylor's melancholy classics. Like "Fire and Rain," "Mona" is an ode to a deceased friend; yet, as the song proceeds, the listener realizes that Mona is not a girlfriend who has committed suicide, but a pet pig whom the singer has disposed of personally...