Word: raines
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...army officer next to me pointed out some Air Force jets in an airstrike. All I could see were the wings swooping down beneath some hills to reappear seconds later. Any explosions were hidden from sight by the hills. I saw plenty of old bomb craters filled with rain water. You could practically follow the craters right into the approaches to Saigon's Ton San Nhut airport. So there really is a war going, I thought. Such are first impressions...
...Rain, always lovers' weather onstage, drives Sylvia into Stan's Greenwich Village flat. She (Marian Seldes) is a bookkeeper who poses as an actress on the basis of her sessions at group-therapy psychodrama. He (Gene Troobnick) is a sportswear buyer who poses as a sculptor by coating tennis rackets, mannequin legs and xylophones with plaster of paris. It is not so much the chemistry of love that fuses the pair as the mutual palpitating fear that they may be cultural dropouts...
Dealing with an inarticulate character complicates a novelist's job. In his second book, Don Carpenter (Hard Rain Falling) takes on two such men and manages to turn them into believable antagonists. The first is Semple, a near-idiot high school boy. Words have little meaning for him; he misreads reality and then forgets it anyway. His attempts at speech are usually glottal grunts. His writing is chicken tracks. There is only one coherent current in his life: his destructive fascination with Harold Hunt, "the ringleader of the hard gang" at school...
Carpenter's success lies in the percussive force with which he pits his antagonists against each other; as he records the radical shifts in their emotional climate, the changes can be felt like heat or sleet. Blade of Light is both more powerful and more controlled than Hard Rain Falling. A calculated, mood-ridden shocker, it is that relatively rare product in contemporary fiction: a strong second novel...
...long ago, Taylor, who studied and danced with Martha Graham for six years, was considered an avant-garde experimenter in choreographic Dada. He composed dances to the sound of rain, and once fashioned a piece in which a couple stood stock-still for four minutes. But in Taylor's Lento, one of the new pieces of his company's current season, his dancers weave gentle patterns to Haydn chamber music, as simple and charming as any moment from Les Sylphides. Another new work, called Agathe's Tale, commits an even stranger breach of experimentalist etiquette: it tells...