Word: oedipuses
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Hillbilly Opera. In discussing the search for order, teachers show how this theme is found in such works as Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Divine Comedy and Death of a Salesman. To help them understand the difficulties of achieving esthetic order, music students at Garden City have been assigned the problem of writing operas of their own: in one, a hillbilly, over his mother's strong objections, goes to New York to pursue a career as a folk singer and becomes famous. Art students take a Vermeer masterpiece and, on a transparent overlay, convert his realism into a cubist painting...
...Reviewer Brad Darrach considers punning the "art of making a fool of yourself. They really should be silly and awful, to stir up your body." Brad's reviews are punctuated with puns: "Between bouts Presley Elviscerates a few songs"; the lead in the movie The Birds is an "Oedipus wreck"; and the Strategic Air Command hero's wife "chews him out for spending too much time...
There are the Beagles and the Roaches, the Dirty Shames and the Cryan Shames. There are the Gurus, the Druids, the Rockin' Vicars, the Swinging Saints and the Godz. And dig the Grateful Dead, the Undertakers, the Guillo-teens and the Morbids. Or Oedipus and the Mothers, Sigmund and the Freudian Slips, and Cleopatra and the Seizures. How about the Virginia Woolves? There are also the Napoleonic Wars, Rasputin and the Chains, the Driving Stupid, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Dow Jones and the Industrials...
Will little Oedipus escape from his complex? The answer is a real skirt-hanger, suggesting every known perversion, until the happy ending when boy rinds a girl like Mom. The Cocteau-film atmosphere of high camp is sustained by skilled faux-simple prose, which at times evokes Heinrich Mann, at other times less skilled practitioners of psychologically sophisticated pornophilia...
...interrelationships-it's more outward in its direction. All the introspective talk of castration anxiety, latent homosexuality or oral emphasis has been replaced by sibling rivalry, alienation, dependency, powerlessness in society, fear of freedom. The new accent is on society. I know very few psychiatrists who even mention Oedipus to their patients any more...