Word: words
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Benson was an illiterate private when his sergeant told him that he would never make a good soldier and should get out of the Army Air Corps. Benson took him at his word and headed for the rugged Kiamichi Mountains of his native Oklahoma. That was in 1943, and he has survived ever since on wild game, berries and occasional handouts from relatives who knew where he was hiding...
...occasion Haigh substitutes another word for the one Shakespeare wrote; at times he fails to heed the pronunciation required by the verse [exTIRpate, wronged, solEMnized]. His lengthy narration at the start is too slow, and his famous "revels now are ended" speech lacks sufficient musicality. He is much better in the abjuration soliloquy--which many have thought to be the playwright's own valedictory, although Shakespeare went on to collaborate on Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the lost Cardenio, and perhaps Sir Thomas More. Haigh has a long way to go before he matches Carnovsky's 1960 Prospero...
...name Caliban may simply be an anagram of cannibal (Shakespeare took some material for the play from Montaigne's essay on cannibals), or it may be related to cauliban, a Gypsy word for blackness, At any rate, Freedman has assigned the role here to a black actor, Joe Morton. A black Caliban is no novelty: the 1945 Webster production had the boxer-turned-actor Canada Lee, whose performance I found too monochromatic; and the 1960 mounting here had an exemplary Earle Hyman, who had been a superlative Othello here three years earlier...
...that such a dream is arrogant, ambitious, unoriginal, and of course it is ... I too will write a book. Another book. I know that our age has been propelled, blackmailed into becoming the Age of Explanation. I feel that literate people have almost explained themselves away. I use the word 'literate' as a fact, not a judgment. At first, you remember, Alice Thumb, it was our anxiety, our unease which was explained away, but in the process, we ourselves have been disappearing. The efficiency of our explanations is like that of the insecticide which reduces the insect...
...first lesson Ryan learns from cancer is how quickly the very word alienates the victim from ordinary life. One pair of friends, when told, sink into embarrassed silence, making Ryan feel that he has committed "some unpardonable gaffe." Colleagues and publishers cannot be trusted: "Somebody's bound to say," he notes, " 'Well, we really can't ask Ryan to do this article or count on him to finish this book, because the poor bastard's got cancer.' " Later on, there are the unbearable pain and disfiguring side effects of powerful drugs. Cushing's syndrome...