Word: pindar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...exiles from the Bay of Pigs than McGuane. A drug bust is "too Cuban for words." Pomeroy's dog "kills a lizard; then, overcome with remorse, tips over in the palm shadows for a troubled snooze." The violence is lovingly plotted, coldly calculated, but respected. Councilman Peavey sends Nylon Pindar the thug to straighten Chet...
...runs annoyingly flat. Tom McGuane jumped the stakes on himself; the epigram that begins the book is "The best epitaph a man can gain is to have accomplished daring deeds of valor against the enmity of fiends during his lifetime." Worthy sentiments, but that hardly makes the comic Nylon Pindar a fiend. More a shitsucker, in Chet's phrase, more Runyonesque. The Caribbean syndicalist novel is not an art form of the future; after all, Hero's engine never really ran anything; it just went around in circles...
...illustrious predecessors: the Greek poet Pindar (circa 500 B.C.) wrote an ode without using the letter sigma. Lewis Carroll, an Oxford mathematician better known for the Alice books, liked to mix the logic of numbers with the freedom of dreams. In this century, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings and Vladimir Nabokov all enjoyed the pleasures of arithmetic while exploring the peripheries of language. But it was not until 1960 that the newly formed OuLiPo officiated at the shotgun wedding of science and literature. Its first and still most remarkable product was Cent Milie Milliards de Poems (A Hundred Thousand...
...just in time to coincide with the goings on in Montreal, two classicists and sports fans, M.I. Finley of England's Cambridge University and H.W. Picket of the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, have culled through ancient records, reviewed the writings of poets and philosophers from Pindar to Plato to reconstruct just what the first games were like. Their account is enlightening. For sheer ballyhoo, bitterness and confusion, the ancient games resemble the modern Olympics much more than anyone might imagine...
...Like Pindar to some lesser bard. Let me some sound advice award To Beckett: Stick thou to thy last, Reverence the masters of the past. And listen! O thou wayward Muse Who first let Beckett on the loose: Small habits, when pursued betimes, Soon reach the dignity of crimes. Michael Ryan...