Word: spengler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Rescuing cats-a sign of his humanity, says Director Richard Donner-is the least of Superman's good deeds. Producers Ilya Salkind, 29, and Pierre Spengler, 30, are determined to outdo the special effects of Star Wars-and reap its profits. "At one time it was exciting to see Superman hold up the end of a truck," says Tom Mankiewicz, the last of five scriptwriters brought in to turn comic strip into film strip. "Now you see Lindsay Wagner do things like that every week on TV for free. So we had a problem, and Superman's feats...
...lively, mordant intelligence is at its best improvising on political ideas - quarreling with Spengler, hallucinating a Socratic dialogue with an Exxon executive. In the end, the author pays a visit of homage to the aging Arnold Toynbee - and plays his own complicated sense of disintegration and renewal against Toynbee's. Toynbee seems to listen with courtly regard as Mee excitedly spins out his vision of a new Renaissance based upon "a truly profound exploration led by neurophysicists and psychologists, structural linguists and anthropologists, into the structure of the mind." Mee demands to know what Toynbee thinks. The great historian...
Frye's writing is, as always, lucid, though the last few essays are difficult for those unfamiliar with the material. In addition, his straightforward presentation is occasionally spiced by a characteristic dry wit. In "Spengler Revisited," for example, Frye writes...
Some of his comparative passages, such as his juxtaposing of colors in Western painting with tonal effects in Western music, read almost like free association. Any number of critics could call these comparisons absurd or mystical balderdash. But Spengler has the power to challenge the reader's imagination, as critics of that type usually have not, and he will probably survive them all even if all of them are right...
...seems to me that Spengler's distinction between primitive and historical existence is the real basis of Yeats's distinction between "primary" cultures and the "antithetical" ones which rise out of them, but the spirits who supplied Yeats with his vision did not know much history...