Word: short
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...control much of the countryside. As a result of the continuing war, food has become a weapon on both sides. The Khmer Rouge routinely ravage the new paddyfields planted under the Vietnamese occupation. Not only are the Cambodians starving, but even the Vietnamese troops are said to be on short rations. Many of the Khmer Rouge have been pressed back into hilly, thickly jungled areas where rice cannot be grown. Still, the Khmer Rouge eat almost as well as they always have; it is the civilian slave laborers they force to accompany them who are starving...
...does, amassing his devastated drilling sites in a collection of short stories called PROBLEMS. If you read them you will probably become depressed. Updike's over-powering stylistic genius overpowers his reader's better judgment, forces him to wallow in the miserableness of his archetypal suburban man, who wanders "an irreducible unit, visiting one or another of the pieces of his life scattered like the treasure of a miser outsmarting thieves." Updike outsmarts, creating melancholy without proposing how solitary suburbanites can collect these bits to make a life worth living. He collects problems without morals...
...expects the answer in the teacher's edition, but Updike refuses to provide even a dim peek at his own view of ethical marital allegiances. In short, what point is there in writing if you have no point to make...
INSTEAD UPDIKE plunges us into a scrutiny of the alienated characters. In "Love Song for a Moog Synthesizer," for instance, he binds us in the "spirals of indignation" of a Cub Scout den mother. Throughout the collection of short stories, Updike stalks the problem of human disconnectedness from all imaginable angles, realistically fleshing it out in "Domestic Life in America," abstracting it in his geometric "Problems," sketching a symbolic outline in the opening piece, "Commercial," recasting it as classical tragedy in "Augustine's Concubine." But he refuses to hunt out the solutions in the diseased scenarios. His "maimed and fanatic...
...production of "Hamlet" with two bad actors. He told a friend. "If I can't act better than those two. I'd better give up." The friend got a friend to hear Hughes read, and hired him to play a one-line role in Frank Lee Short's production of "The Taming of the Shrew...