Word: surreal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PRICKSONGS & DESCANTS, by Robert Coover. In a collection of clever, surreal-and sometimes repellent-short stories, the author of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop, plays a literary shell game with his readers...
...does not. The straight middle-class American breadwinner, secure and affluent beyond the dreams of his grandparents or most of his contemporaries elsewhere in the world, Mr. Jones of Dylan's mocking lyric, finds himself in a world more surreal than a moonscape. He looks behind, and realizes that his children are not following. At a frightening distance, in their own arcane pastures of the mind, the young strip and ululate and make love to the accompaniment of manic cacophonies. Even in the Joneses' own backyard, thrusting up between the roses and the hollyhocks, a sharp eye may spot...
...third episode that keeps Spirits alive. Never Bet the Devil Your Head is Federico Fellini's first film since Juliet of the Spirits, and it is a 40-minute excursion across the surreal landscape of his boundless imagination. Never centers on a washed-up Shakespearean actor named Toby Dammit (Terence Stamp) who has come to Rome to star in "the first Catholic Western." He is hounded by his own self-contempt and haunted by a vision of a corrupt cupid from hell, a devil in crinoline (Marina Yaru), who appears before him bouncing a large and somehow ominous white...
...hideous as Los Angeles, and with as many cars per head, and past the 20-foot neon sign for Coppertone on a Church. . .on to the White House of El Presidente Leoni, his small men with 18-inch repeating pistols. . .while we had champagne. . ." Lowell sees through to the surreal dimension, his own eye "sprouting bits of string gliding like dragonkites in the Chinese...
...less important. Perhaps the reader learns to use the book, to play with the order and ideas; or with the year in mind the quality and sense of each poem comes to mean the quality and sense of a moment, a day--some flat, banal, moody, hopeful, senseless, surreal, clear, brilliant. And Lowell has the license of the great poet to use dead moments in his designs. The images in Notebook circulate around the poet and his time--describing a curious age in sadness, in chaos, in revolution, and--if weary and bitter-in health, "unconquerable flux...