Word: soldier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Only a few stories have direct links to the past decade. Night March, by Tim O'Brien, is a solid bit of realism about a young soldier in Viet Nam from the author's award-winning novel, Going After Cacciato. John Sayles' I-80 Nebraska, M.490-M.205 is a mannered attempt to turn truckers and their CB jargon into folk legend: the headless horseman as Teamster. The most inventive topical piece is Guy Davenport's The Richard Nixon Freischutz Rag, a whimsical satire in which the former President makes small talk in China. Sample...
Another task remains. Report from the Aleutians, San Pietro and Let There Be Light must be seen on a single program, as a single work. Each comments on, draws contrast with and enriches the others. Together they describe the arc of experience common to every foot soldier in every war: the preparation, the fighting, the hope of recovery and reconciliation...
...Ambition and success seem simply to have departed from the American novel. In the novels of Hemingway almost no work is good work-or, much the same thing, manly work-unless it confronts danger; one is permitted to be a bullfighter, a fisherman, a soldier, and of course a novelist, but all other work is trivial. In the work of a more rounded novelist, Willa Cather ... success is admired, but only success in the past: the new men that have arisen to seize it are grubby, narrow, without vision, unlike the heroic pioneer generation with its integrity, honor, heroism. William...
...late 1970s, the café attracted some of Peking's most stylish youth, like New Nation Li, "attired in silken shirt and a well-tailored, gray Western suit with tight-fitting bell-bottom pants and pointed black shoes." Or Benefit-the-People Wang, by day a soldier in the People's Liberation Army, by night an exponent of the funky layered look. "From the chin up he looks like a gangster. From his neck to his knees he seems like an Englishman who has just stepped out of his neighborhood pub into the London fog. But below...
...country, equalled in degree only, perhaps, by money. There is nothing more intimately involved with the American way of being a man than the ability to knock someone down with a fist, and the cachet of a prizefighter exceeds that of, say, a football or hockey player, or a soldier, or certainly a novelist. In a century of institutional mayhem on such a scale that not only motives but actual numbers are impossible to comprehend, the boxer is our Deerslayer, the last surviving synthesis of American violence and American aloneness. And whether the boxer deserves to be a hero, still...