Word: shelleys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...overtones of the thirsty count's exploits are chiefly sexual, leading to titillation rather than thought. That is not true of Frankenstein's man-made man-monster. He troubles the mind because he is a projection of the mind, a soaring ambition shockingly embodied in flesh. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) appeared well before Freud, well before the technologies of organ transplants and genetic tinkering that make the laboratory creation of life ever more plausible. Yet the young author, only 19 when she began her tale, guessed horrible possibility that increasingly haunts the modern mind...
Such speculation may seem lugubrious to those who know the monster only through Boris Karloff 's film impersonations or through such burlesques as the TV sitcom The Munsters and Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. As this collection of twelve essays suggests, though, Mary Shelley's novel is a surprisingly open-ended source of disturbing, even terrifying implications. Its awkwardness and philo sophical uncertainties mark Frankenstein as the first and most powerful modern myth, not a pure Jungian river flowing through the collective unconscious but a polluted industrial spillway...
...disease evokes images of pale, suffering poets like Keats and Shelley or wanly beautiful heroines like La Boheme 's Mimi and Camille wasting away in the arms of their lovers. Indeed, during the 19th century, tuberculosis-or consumption, as it was then called-exacted a horrifying toll; up to 20% of the population in Western countries died of it before the age of 50. But by 1882, when the German bacteriologist Robert Koch demystified the disease by identifying the tiny rod-shaped tubercle bacillus that caused it, the tide was turning...
...better films are particularly depressing. Like Nashville, A Perfect Couple features a climactic death, weird minor characters who traipse mysteriously through the action, as well as a lengthy musical score, sung by Sheila's rock group. There are even moments when Heflin starts to look like Shelley Duvall. But this time Altman's idiosyncratic devices are not organic to his material; he slaps them clumsily onto the film, like aimless graffiti doodled on a billboard...
Another objection: Euroblood may not always be available. Last month a severe cold wave in Europe kept donors home and cut shipments by 20%. Also, some Europeans, like the German magazine Stern, are having second thoughts about the blood traffic. Warns Dr. Shelley Brown of the Council of Hospital Blood Bank Directors in New York City: "For anything as vital as blood, it's unwise to become overly dependent on a supply that you cannot control...