Word: fictionalizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Magacian of Lublin is a bittersweet variation on the theme of the Wandering Jew; Satan in Goray deals with the orgiastic response to a false messiah in seventeenth-century Poland, while stories like "Short Friday" celebrate domesticity and the simple virtues: But perhaps Singer's masterpiece of short fiction, "Gimpel the Fool." provides the most tender display of his virtuoso talent. In a world which places a premium on wisdom, Singer's hero is the fool, the one who receives goat turds instead of sweets. The simpleton is the perfect symbol of alienated man-the butt of both divine...
...views efficiency as a dehumanizing, soul-devouring force. The cult began long ago, with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. In their nightmare Utopias, Brave New World and 1984, they depicted future dictatorships made all the more oppressive by relentless efficiency. The counter-cult has strong expression in modern science fiction. Example: in This Perfect Day, Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby, describes a futuristic society ruled by a gigantic computer, Uni, which calculates the most "efficient" assignments of careers for its many human subjects and, like a computerized dating service gone wild, even mates them...
...Fiction Factory. To enjoy so many activities and still turn out as many as 7,000 words a day, Gardner exercised cast-iron discipline. As part of what he called his "fiction factory," on a 1,000-acre ranch at Temecula, Calif., he kept up to seven full-time secretaries busy transcribing the novels he dictated into a battery of tape recorders. For privacy, he worked in strategically located trailers and houseboats. When his first wife died in 1968, one of his secretaries, Agnes Jean Bethell, became Mrs. Gardner. She had come to work...
...devotee of cheap Sodom-in-the-suburbs fiction can predict the finale. Walpurgisnacht occurs at a monumental bash thrown by your typical Fairfield County vulgarian. Crocked, randy, and desperate to get "the Lepridon account," Wilson beds down with the wife (Nancie Phillips) of a fellow commuter in the outside playhouse. Sure enough, a TV monitor, installed to oversee children at play, records the grope for the amusement of the guests and the despair of Mrs., mistress...
Fellini calls his Satyricon a "science-fiction trip into the past instead of the future." It blasts off with a scene so brilliant that the whole picture shivers from the thrust. In a masque, a musically flatulent clown capers on a stage, mocking the audience with scatological jokes and gestures. A grinning idiot is carried onstage and led to a chopping block. A headsman mimes a blow with his weapon -then chops the victim's hand off to a chorus of cackles, while freshets of blood stain the scene. It is a savage fragment of the cinema of cruelty...