Word: speech
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jackson was moving on to Havana later on Monday, reporters back home were catching up with Farrakhan's latest pronouncements. Though reporters were barred from his Sunday-afternoon harangue to followers at his Chicago headquarters, the speech was carried by a local radio station and a few journalists taped it. Some reports said Farrakhan had called Judaism a "gutter religion." Farrakhan vehemently denied this, offering a reward of "$100,000 and my life to anyone" who could prove he said "gutter." He insisted he had termed it a "duty religion," as though the distinction were significant. People listening...
...Yorker writer since 1959, acknowledged five instances, and said there may have been others, in which he modified facts. By far the most troubling episode was a December 1961 "Letter from Barcelona" in which Reid described Spaniards sitting in "a small, flyblown bar," jeering openly at a televised speech by the then Dictator Francisco Franco. In fact, the bar as described no longer existed at the time of the broadcast, and Reid watched Franco's address in the home of the establishment's onetime bartender. Two of the main characters in the article were composites; some opinions supposedly...
...Talk of the Town," a compendium of short, quasi-editorial reports, he described his son's 1982 Yale graduation from the purported perspective of "a flinty old friend . . . from the country" attending the graduation of a grandniece. He devised a similar character, and fictitious dialogue, to report a speech at New York University by Nobel-Prizewinning Poet Czeslaw Milosz. Reid's explanation: using a fictional persona helped him overcome writer's block. Personae, such as "our man Stanley," and pseudonyms, such as the railroad buff "E.M. Frimbo," are common devices in "Talk...
...anguish of that search lies the profundity of Rabe's work. The playwright is functioning here as far more than a realist with an unsurpassed ear for contemporary speech. What he is saying, finally, is that words have begun to fail. The vocabulary in which his people speak, a jargon derived from televised reductions of reality and popularized psychology, leaves them without the tools they need to know their own minds, let alone the complexities of their shared existence. The bitterest of the many laughs Rabe provides derives from his recognition that the relentless articulateness of his people...
Since his subject is language, he is obliged to define his characters through the rhythms of their speech, and he rises superbly to that most difficult of playwright's challenges. In testing himself, he is testing audiences as well. Usually plays about language call flashy attention to what they are doing. Rabe requires us to understand that when he is examining clichés he is not endorsing them. As with language, so with morality. The sympathy he feels for his mystified characters is not to be understood as approval...