Word: rudyard
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...this show corrects--that he was a realist in a simple and straightforward way--was wrong. It reckons without the deep strand of existential pessimism that runs in Homer's work and that creates its own symbolic structures. For Homer, as for another great and underrated artist, his contemporary Rudyard Kipling, man is at constant war with his surroundings in a world that cares nothing about him and gives him no natural allies. The moment you step from the social path, where security is an illusion, all becomes wild and strange, and Homer's work abounds in metaphors of this...
...Golden State native, I've grown accustomed to these barbs. Of course, Harvard students aren't the first ones to come up with such zingers. Over a century ago, Rudyard Kipling called San Francisco a "mad city" full of "perfectly insane people." Frank Lloyd Wright once hypothesized that all the loose nuts in America end up in Los Angeles because of the continental tilt. California is La-La Land, Shangri-La La, a place that twice elected a guy nicknamed "Moonbeam" governor. Yes, getting a good dig in at California is a bonafide American tradition...
...about the inner life of the writers. My only fear is that writers delegate themselves to this corner bodega. To escape the provincialism of roots and be expansive in the manner of a wonderful writer like [Jose] Lezama Lima, or [Jorge Luis] Borges or, for that matter, someone like Rudyard Kipling. And if I can find a readership in that way, then I think it will take the shackles of being politically and sociologically correct off of writers that may want to do different things, but don't because they're afraid...
...been invented for California and that in the dictionary California is a virtual synonym for "far out." Ever since gold was first found flowing in its rivers, the Shangri-La La of the West has been the object of as many gibes as fantasies: just over a century ago, Rudyard Kipling was already pronouncing that "San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people" (others might say "insanely perfect"); and more than 40 years ago, S.J. Perelman was barreling down the yellow brick road to L.A., the "mighty citadel which had given the world...
...Nicholson's best performance in the past five years? With all due respect to Batman and The Witches of Eastwick, it just may be a half-hour stint Nicholson did for, of all things, a children's video. He is narrator of The Elephant's Child, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's whimsical story about how the elephant got its trunk. Backed by the music of Bobby McFerrin, Nicholson gives a droll, spirited reading, wrapping his tongue around Kipling's sensuous words -- "the great, gray-green, greasy Lim-po-po River" -- like a gourmet savoring oysters...