Word: spoonful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...find a painted human figure of such monumental gravity. All is volume, all is power, not only the large masses--the head that seems hewn from some skin-colored rock, the torso and the flaring blue pyramid of the skirt, the cylindrical coffeepot and the cup with the spoon set vertically in it--but also the microforms, such as the knot tying the woman's apron at her waist, which has the finality of a turned lock. The poetry of this image isn't in expression--it is almost ineloquent--but in space, form and immense deliberation...
...assertion at a time. "Bread is a food," for example, or "You're wet when you sweat." CYC knows nearly a million of these rules now, and when it has another million or so under its belt, Lenat asserts, the program should be savvy enough to need no more spoon feeding. It will just swallow the encyclopedia whole and then ask questions about whatever it doesn't understand...
Charles Aidman's 1963 adaptation succeeded partly because audiences liked the "adult" themes and partly because a political message emerged from the small rural cemetery in which it was set. All classes, races and religions from Spoon River were buried there together indiscriminately, and the equality implied naturally struck Aidman as utopian...
...memory and how memory is adapted, treated and socialized. Like Levi-Strauss recording folklore, Masters was preserving in writing an oral history that would have continued to transform itself over the years beyond recognition of its original form or died out altogether had he not interceded. How residents of Spoon River handled memory is the most trenchant aspect of the Nora Theater's current production...
Engel's production works best as a record of how people reconstruct their pasts; the subject itself, which relates a lot of all-too-familiar hardship, has lost its impact. Spoon River is occasionally sad, seldom funny, but not meant to be either. Nor is it meant to be tragic. Rather the mood is elegiac in that it tries to describe the need for people to tell their stories as they would like them to be remembered. History, according to Spoon River, is constructed piecemeal and painstakingly from scraps assembled and melded together...