Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have never left the U.S. except for a glimpse over the Mexican and Canadian fences. I have done that only because the nature, the landscape is the same on both sides of the frontier. I am afraid to visit Europe, to see all your ancient towns, all your fairy-tale castles because, as I understand, all the landscape in Europe is converted into overcultured scenery. I'll never be the same after such a trip. I might lose my identity...
...opening scene, famous for its courtly formality, its symmetry, and its fairy-tale irrationality, looks completely straightforward until you notice the Fool wandering around in a squat, waving a wooden gyroscope over his head like some mystical wand. The standard swipes, grunts, and lunges of the Shakespearian sword-fight punctuate the duel between Edgar and Edmund, but the preceding battle between France's forces and the English army becomes a strange slow-motion dumbshow on Cain's stage...
...saga of signalcallers in '79 is a familiar story to Harvard football fans: a tale that has turned the tide in the last two Harvard games, handing the Crimson two straight non-League losses...
...stories to tell is finite and dwindling; print has been rendered passe by film and electronics; realism is an irrational goal for the writer (What is real? Whose reality is it?); art rehashes art. Barth's response was to exalt artifice and make telling the subject of the tale. Giles Goat-Boy (1966) was less a novel than a treatise on the archetypes of heroism; some of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse (1968) suggested antiphonal readings between printed page and tape recorder, or struggled gamely just to get themselves started; the three novellas in Chimera (1972) portrayed...
...this third novel (after Last Night at the Brain Thieves' Ball and Preservation Hall) Spencer builds a model of emergent love pursued to its obsessive extreme. The author constructs his tale around an apposite metaphor, catastrophic fire. Seventeen-year-old David Axelrod sets some newspapers alight on the porch of his beloved Jade's house after her parents have forbidden him to see her for 30 days. He wishes to attract attention and instead nearly incinerates Jade, her brothers and parents...