Word: sagas
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...Record Industry Association of America (RIAA)--representing the traditional recording industry--and the millions of college kids downloading free jams over the Net has begun to resemble those chewing-gum commercials where fusty geezers shake their canes at crazy kids and their "flavor crystals." The latest twist in this saga of college kids ignoring their elders, not to mention copyright law, is the emergence of file-sharing software that makes it easy to swap with fellow pirateers music stored on computer hard drives--generically known as MP3 files...
Credit for this surge of interest should rest squarely on the marvelous language that Heaney has found to set this old warhorse of a saga running again. All translations, especially of poetry, involve constant compromises between sense and sound, between the literal meanings of the original words and the unique music to which they were set. The Anglo-Saxon idiom of Beowulf sounds particularly alien to modern ears: four stresses per line, separated in the middle by a strong pause, or caesura, with the third stress in each line alliterating with one or both of the first two. Heaney follows...
...trend perhaps started in the late '80s, when Michigan housewife Terry Rakolta crusaded against Married...with Children, elevating the Bundy-family saga from crapola to cause celebre. Now the job of shocking an increasingly unshockable bourgeoisie falls ever more to commercials, ratings stunts like Ally McBeal's--you'll be stunned to see these hot women kissing!--or worse. No one will rank Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? with Roots, yet what good TV program has lately stirred such debate about feminism, money and a holy sacrament...
...Pequots that were handed over to the Mohegans in the deal never quite gave up their old identity, and gradually they recreated the tribe. Three hundred and fifty years later, revenge is sweet: Foxwoods pulls rank on upstart Mohegan Sun. Entering a new era in the tribe's saga, the descendants of the last of the Pequots have resurrected the tribe once more. But Trump's question remains: instead of the continuation of a tradition, is the tribe's latest, capitalist recreation just an embarrassing parody--even an exploitation--of its own past...
...room, among others, is a lucky recipient of this 24-hour programming. Even I, a self-avowed philosopher more interested in the Scandinavian excursions of Wittgenstein than the continuing saga of inebriated strangers, find such eavesdropping hard to avoid. My desk and bed are away from the window and my shade is drawn. I've tried playing music, but not at 3 a.m.--as has been said, the walls and windows are thin...