Word: settings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...handkerchief and slicked-back hair, unquestionably played the role of entertainer and host throughout the night. He makes a point of arranging poems to transcribed musical improvisations, and he did not disappoint with a version of Robert Pinsky’s “The Broken City” set to Wayne Shorter’s haunting “They Speak No Evil.” His voice, a piercing jet of sound, flew over the jagged melodics, weaving them into a blindingly rapid melody, as Malone and Barron easily grounded him in a modal swing. On the other...
...epic is a touchstone for tales of travel and homecoming. As early as the first century BCE, Vergil was borrowing from the Greek epic to tell his own “Aeneid”; Leopold Bloom’s very different wandering in “Ulysses” set the bar almost impossibly high for modern adaptations. Mason’s book, then, faces its own Scylla and Charybdis—on the one hand, the menace of literary forerunners whose adaptations are now classics themselves; on the other, the possibility of merely echoing a tale already sung...
Also like Calvino, Mason prefers puzzles to set truths. For that reason, his novel goes beyond a simple adaptation of a classic text. In his essay “Why Read the Classics?” Calvino once wrote, “A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much a sense of discovery as the first reading.” Mason’s reimagining takes such discovery to heart. He himself may be aware of the similarities between his and the Italian author’s work. Many of his plot twists recall Calvino?...
...production elements. On “When I’m Small,” background crackling makes it sound as though the song is being played on a cheap vinyl record player. This attempt to avoid the crystal clarity of electro pop and set Phantogram apart from similar groups like Postal Service makes the album less accessible than it might have been. It does, however, succeed in livening up the album’s repetitive beats and melodies, which otherwise could become rather sterile and bland...
Halfway through the current 111th Congress, the filibuster has already been invoked 74 times, putting it on pace to surpass the 110th Congress, which set the high mark with 139. That was more than double the mark set by the Democratic minority in the previous Congress, 68. By comparison, there were only 70 filibusters in the entire period between 1919 (when Senate rules were changed to allow supermajorities to end a filibuster...