Word: rituals
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Miss McKenna has a magnetic personality, and she knows how to populate a stage singlehanded. At the same time, she releases the audience's imaginative powers. What animates her performance is that she so obviously loves her people deep down in her bones. Delivering a ritual lament in Gaelic, she creates an atmosphere of runic awe; her body becomes a crucible of Irish antiquity and suffering...
HAVE YOU heard of Joe Orton? Tate? Joplin? Hendrix? Separating individual merit from phantasmagoric death-legend is the whole problem in these cases. If you are asked who Orton is, you had better be ready with information: he was a homosexual, a British playwright killed in a ritual hammer slaying in 1967. What comes up second when Orton's name is mentioned is the fact that he wrote Loot, Entertaining Mr. Sloane and several other black comedies. Loot, you see, has a corpse for its focus, just as Orton's life, ironically and grotesquely, had in the final tally...
...ritual of parties-out-of-power, the Democrats are beginning to rally around the unifying idea that Richard Nixon can be beaten in 1972-a thought encouraged by the party's gains in the 1970 elections. It is hardly too early for the Democrats to begin. The party is financially strapped, disorganized and lacking any coherent special program to offer as an alternative to the Administration...
...burden was borne by Myrna, who spent twelve hours a day teaching karate at the downtown Jack LaLanne's. Our only recreation was listening to Rod McKuen on Sunday, and except for a few old posters of Mao and Marcuse, a signed photo of Kate Millett and a ritual five-minute recitation at midnight from the Little Red Book, she had given up radical politics altogether. I suspect that she would not have survived at all without wheat germ and a Spiro Agnew voodoo doll. Still, it was worth it. Come graduation, I was, once again, numero uno, besieged...
While Mailer is not one to repeat himself. there is much here that we have seen before. There are the ritual reports on his bowels, liver, and marriages; his preoccupation with the small town mind; the constant dualities of vision: the stylistic brilliance, the quick substitutions of abstract for concrete; the sweeping flights, within single phrases, from the commonplace to the sublime (Hemingway's brains are "scattered now in every atmosphere"); metaphors that reach out and grasp every aspect of common experience; and the quick observations that outgun entire works of lesser writers (as when Frank McGee is described...