Word: mythical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...REMEMBER those hot summer nights of six or seven years ago, lying on the floor of my family room, staring up at the near-mythic figure of Richard Nixon on the television screen. I remember cursing the image, and throwing pillows, coke cans, whatever was handy at it. I recall being filled with wonder at the man who could seemingly do anything and justify it to himself and then have the nerve to try to justify it to me. Who can forget the perspiring Nixon fumblingly pointing to the map of Indochina, identifying the Parrot's Beak for the Silent...
...Gardner's organization is baffling, at least his style is endearing. The sense of mythic wonder that fills his books Grendel and Jason and Medea is present here in the form of vignettes and metaphors; and even when he rattles on about the good and the true, Gardner never pontificates, never becomes self-righteous. Even when what he says sounds like it would suit a preacher among the unbaptized, his manner remains that of the elderly raconteur, sitting by the fire with a mug of ale and a pipe...
Critics of the critic suggested that Fiedler was playing to the crowd with a limited script based on pop Freud and Jungian stereotypes. His enthusiasm for discovering mythic power in such popular arts as movies and comic books was not appreciated by the guardians of high culture. Yet Fiedler outflanked them by describing himself as a hybrid of chutzpah (Yiddish for nerve or gall) and pudeur (French for modesty or reserve...
...primarily felt as objects not of awe but of pity. The true Freak, however, stirs both supernatural terror and natural sympathy, since, unlike the fabulous monsters, he is one of us, the human child of human parents, however altered by forces we do not quite understand into something mythic and mysterious, as no mere cripple ever is. Passing either on the street, we may be simultaneously tempted to avert our eyes and to stare; but in the latter case we feel no threat to those desperately maintained boundaries on which any definition of sanity ultimately depends. Only the true Freak...
...very different dimension opens in "Scallops" and "Figure 8," two sections added late to the piece. In both, the lights dim, and suddenly the dancers inhabit a remote world, a mythic world. Their place is no longer the kinesphere, the space within reach of the human figure. Their gestures relate to the entire space of the stage; the dancers have become larger-than-life...