Word: magician
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...become very interested in magic, and we're very serious about this trip. We're hoping to see this magician who practices both white and black magic. He has a very long and difficult name which we can't pronounce. We call him Banana for short...
...takes a major writer to commit a major blunder. What Barth publishes matters, in capital Letters, and this novel will fuel brush fires in academic journals and little quarterlies for years to come. Considerations will be reconsidered, opinions re-opined. At this moment though, Barth looks like a magician who has described too fully the trip wires up his sleeve or the spare tiger dozing fitfully in a box just offstage. As he talks on and on, piling analysis upon explanation, the audience slowly files out. If Joyce's Ulysses was the milestone of modernism, Barth's Letters...
...entertainment in which clowns, jugglers and acrobats capered across the stage. Flames shot up from nowhere. Flowers sprouted suddenly in a spittoon. A chorus stalked the aisles chanting a pitch for patent medicine. The hero was played by no less than three performers-a singer, a dancer and a magician. Before a note was even heard, the magician was hanging by his feet high over the stage, wriggling free of a straitjacket...
...events in the magician's life, freely rearranged, are played out in stylized, pageantlike scenes. His birth is presented as his first "great escape." But he remains passionately tied to his mother. Her death at the peak of his career leads him to court, then to denounce, the spiritualists who are unable to put him in touch with her. After his own death, his wife Bess holds seances for ten years in an attempt to reach...
...water-can escape, were authentically and grippingly duplicated by Mark Mazzarella, a 19-year-old college sophomore. But the cost of going for such theatrical pizazz was a loss of psychological depth. Houdini offered almost no plot, almost no human interplay. Throughout the evening, a large portrait of the magician stared out at the performers from the ear of the stage, as if challenging them to account for his mysterious driven nature. The tricks, the career, the public appropriation of him as a hero were all here. But the man himself? Once again, he escaped. - Christopher Porterfield