Word: oedipus
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...came a Harvard man--a math prof by trade--with a crew cut, a strangulated tenor and a way of forcing parables of antisocial behavior (e.g., incest) into jolly rhyme schemes ("I'd rather marry a duck-billed pledipus/ Than end up like old Oedipus/ Rex"). For a few years, on albums and in concerts, Lehrer was a comedy hero to the intelligentsia and other lonely people. He surfaced briefly to write songs for the TV shows That Was the Week That Was (no one, not even those who tried, can forget National Brotherhood Week) and The Electric Company (kids...
Finally, Henrietta finds some good fortune, as she comes upon an "Old Vagabond" sitting on a park bench who has lost his glasses. The search proves "bootless," but she walks the president of the "Great University" home--and by recognizing his references to Hamlet and Oedipus Rex earns his respect...
...life; certainly none invented more about it. It still seems pretty weird, that inventory of impotence and aggression, of bizarre terrors and fetishes. But in the '20s and '30s it was beyond mere weirdness. Dali must have enjoyed the worst relations with his father of anyone else since little Oedipus. In 1930 his parent wrote a frantic letter to Dali's friend, film director Luis Bunuel, begging him to prevent the artist's coming anywhere near him: "My son has no right to embitter my life," and his mother's health "will be destroyed if my son sullies it with...
...mind is clear... He lives within his income, within his temperament, within his emotional means. Is he happy? By most measurements, yes, he believes he is." And then comes the first crack in the wall of his self-satisfaction: "However, he has not forgotten the last chorus of Oedipus: Call no man happy until he is dead...
This may help him preserve his sanity, but Lurie--resolutely blind, like Oedipus, to the less schematic aspects of life--loses everything else. "One gets used to things getting harder," he realizes. "One ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet." Disgrace is a mini-opera without music by a writer at the top of his form. Its bleak vision lingers, shattering any hope of a redemptive state of grace...