Word: swiftian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pacifist, spend days assembling highly unorthodox outfits for their Orthodox wedding. Mara's veil is an old tea-stained lace tablecloth that gets caught on her steel-rimmed glasses; Sudah is resplendent in a black velvet suit, cape and top hat. First Novelist Tova Reich's glancing Swiftian wit never flags. She introduces one Rabbi Leon Lieb, who owns a chain of nursing homes and uses cajolery, threats and his-and-her fox cloaks as he obsessively tries to transform his son-in-law into a proper husband. But the newlyweds insist on going their own comic...
...Swiftian Disgust. Percy does not fully avoid liability for such beliefs. He clearly uses Lancelot's Swiftian disgust at the "whorehouse and fagdom of America" to score points against contemporary permissiveness. One sometimes wonders just how loony Percy's hero is intended to be. Is it probable that a canny good ole boy like Lancelot would go violently round the bend at the news of his wife's cheating...
Aspirin or Ice Bag. With Swiftian hyperbole, Berman modestly proposes that "over 80% of the patients chancing the physician's skills have little more wrong with them than what a considerate spouse, a kindly bartender or a hefty raise in salary couldn't cure." For most of the rest, he would prescribe nothing more exotic than milk of magnesia, aspirin, an ice bag or Preparation...
Reith extended his Swiftian disdain for humanity to himself. The saddest and most redeeming entry in his ill-tempered chronicles is Reith's admission: "I have always known that I had a horrid character and disposition. And now I am querulous and embittered and small and shrunken and can't see even near the horizon. Believing nothing and without faith or hope, [I am] stifled and strangling and submerged by the pettiness of my own preoccupations...
...Bakshi had any genuine skill as a satirist or draftsman, these spiritual descendants of the Uncle Remus characters might have become participants in the sort of Swiftian drama he apparently intended. There are hints here and there of a desire to demonstrate that black street styles are not stereotypes at all but put-ons. Such disguises can-sometimes-help individuals to get at least some of what they want with out permitting a hostile world to know that they are trying. Bakshi's sensibility is too vulgar for such an exercise. With a newspaper storm breaking around...