Word: peel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Bruce Jay Friedman and Yahweh-knows-who! Will it never end? Apparently not. And what is most trying, this latest exemplar deserves special attention. For Bernard Malamud has invented a mixed-up little anti-hero all his own: the schlemiel-saint-eyes on heaven, feet on the banana peel. He has appeared in short stories (The Magic Barrel) and novels (A New Life, The Fixer). The Malamud man wobbles between laughter and tears. One minute he can be all suffering profile, squirming against his private cross. The next minute one eye winks, his shoulders shrug, his mouth gives a little...
Capon moves with ease from the mundane to the divine, and back again. He can write about food with lip-smacking enthusiasm; at the same time, he soars far above standard cookbook prosody. His loving description of how to peel and cut an onion, for example, is a poetically existential commentary on being and creation: "Reflect how little smell there is to a whole onion-how it is the humors and sauces of being that give the world flavor, how all life came from the sea, and how, without water, nothing can hold a soul...
...commissioner and city planners, who in recent years have managed to replace 22 depressed acres of slums with office buildings, hotels and theaters. The city's present target is one that many Baltimoreans had long considered inviolable: the Block. A loud, neon-bathed concentration of gin mills and peel parlors, the Block (which at present embraces four city blocks) is a short walk from the waterfront-and only a few paces from city hall and police headquarters...
...theatre in which Blood Knot is being given is a relic from the age of movie palaces. A second-story rotunda gapes above the lobby and fleurs-delis peel from the dome over the stage. There are new pastel stripes painted on the lobby floor, but the heart of the place is in decay. So the theatre, and so the Country...
...whose idea of beauty is a replica of the Presidential Seal embroidered by his daughter? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, we must hope for something wonderful to happen. After all, wouldn't it be nice if just once we could see our absurdly serious President slip on a banana peel and land flat...