Word: singeing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mark Kramer's Mother Walter and the Pig Tragedy is an uneasy eulogy for the dying remnant. It's the foreshadowing of a requiem we'll probably be too busy to sing, for an eccentric community, which Kramer calls "Clabberville," of western Massachusetts farmers. The book is not a romance; it doesn't try to win you back to the land with the cheerleading tone of some pseudo-Movement drivel. The book is personalized journalism, comprising 28 pieces which Kramer wrote for the old Phoenix. These are honest first-hand sketches of the blessings and limits of rural existence...
Billie and DeDe sing on all the blues and many of the other songs. Whenever they sing, they show how closely the early jazz instrumental sound modelled the voice of the jazz singer. The twists of melody and even the harmony are less important to the music than the setting of the one instrumental tone against another, while the intense rhythm carries the song forward to its abrupt...
...complicated narrative line necessitates rapid crosscutting of scenes so that continuity of impact and emotional involvement are somewhat fragmented. More distracting is a pseudoGreek chorus of three women and two men who sing out the next stop in the plot rather like train conductors...
...There she "sundowned"-experienced hallucinations because of strange surroundings. Miss Larson had the sense-and means-to refuse to join other patients in "the parking lot," a drab room in which they were expected to sit mutely in wheelchairs or, as a special treat, were asked to sing childish songs. There was also Charlie, who had stuck his head in his gas oven, and who complained when rescued: "But a man has a right to die, don't he? He don't have to just sit and wait, sit and wait for death...
Lahr looks for America in the extreme situation. Benny sells his body to a hospital; he wanders the great city of America bumping into "weirdos dressed like Indians or Hunters or Afri can Warriors or Buddhist types who look you in the eye and sing to you." Increasingly, American fiction takes for its raw material things unearthly and bizarre. It is as though Nathanael West's Day of the Locust has been translated from a metaphor for lunacy into a lit mus test of reality...