Word: sermonic
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...American gangsterese. Photographed by Raoul Coutard, written by Jorge Semprun, directed by Costa-Gavras (there's talent in those credits), this chronicle of the Czech Slansky trials resonates with modern fears of industrial slates, of resulting dehumanization, and the ascendance of politics over morals. But it's no sermon: the bulk of the film is anti-melodramatic, a complex historical document, and terror comes through to both mind and gut because...
...Exception and the Rule is as concise and bitter as any of his sermons can be, Karl Langmann, investor-speculator-merchant, sets out across the Jahi desert with a load of unidentified but valuable goods, accompanied by a guide, a coolie, and a riding crop. His competitors are always right behind him; in trying to keep ahead he overworks both his men, eventually fires (unjustly) his guide, and shoots (intentionally) his coolie. Langmann's philosophy, we are told repeatedly, is "sick men die, but strong men fight." Langmann's world is one made for fighters, one where "who has good...
...FIRE SERMON, by Wright Morris. An 82-year-old codger tries to save his eleven-year-old great-nephew's soul from the modern world during a symbol-paved journey in a trailer hitched to an ancient Maxwell...
...satisfy a scholarly predilection for evolution: the more primitive Mark evolving into the smoother, more elaborated Matthew and Luke. Farmer returns to a sequence proposed by Griesbach: Matthew, then Luke, then Mark. Farmer's critics ask why Mark would have omitted so much of importance, such as the Sermon on the Mount and so many of the parables. Defenders reply that Mark's could have been simply a special-purpose Gospel for a particular community, or perhaps a selective rewrite job done on Matthew and Luke by 2nd century Gnostics...
...there appear to be no direct transplants from Pound. Except for an odd "an" or "who," he inserted only two words into The Waste Land: "demobbed" for "coming back out of the Transport Corps," and "demotic" to replace "abominable" when Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant of "The Fire Sermon," made an indecent proposition "in abominable French...