Word: heroic
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What is male body building--with its heroic chestwork, Alpine biceps and sculpted glutes--if not an artful parody of the average male body? And what is female body building if not a parody of the male body too? Instead of aspiring to Daisy Mae curves, and turning to cotton or cosmetic surgery to fulfill the image, women on the cutting edge of body building demand the taut bulges of an Arnold Schwarzenegger and pump iron (lift weights) like crazy to achieve them. Pumping Iron (1977) was a deadpan docufarce that transformed Schwarzenegger from a curiosity into a celebrity. Pumping...
James Dance's "Cricket, An Heroic Poem" is more light hearted verse. This English fascination with the sport foreshadows America's own fixation with baseball: "They pleasures, cricket! All his heart control; They eager transports dwell upon his soul." After denouncing billiards, and cricket's sister sport tennis, Dance elevates cricket to a heroic level, emblemtic of London's proud, patriotic demeanor...
...Pope, will survive with or without his attentions. The editor's real concern lies with "some of the totally forgotten men and women whose literary bones I disturbed after they had slumbered peacefully for some two hundred years..." In a sense, Lonsdale has no business indulging in such heroic exhuming. Although the minor poems he has uncovered are valuable for historical documentation, they cannot hope to impress in the manner of Pope's heroic couplets or Johnson's manly verse. Yet literature never adapts itself to such hierarchical thinking, and one of the virtues of Lonsdale's book is that...
...celebrated as the Metaphysicals or the Romantics but they are significant because their ideas do project the country that impressed their minds. Lonsdale's will be a controversial book because he gives so much credence (and space) to rough hewn versifyers. Yet those willing to excuse slightly less than heroic couplets, and some jarring syntax will enjoy many agreeable hours of reading about people living in an age of transition
...Week or a late show. Once in a while, though, a film will buck the glut of exploitation movies and attract any viewer who still carries a hankie. Critic Raymond Durgnat called them "male weepies": films to make a grown man, or a baby mogul, cry. They describe a heroic life struggle that may end in defeat or death but never in ignominy. There is nothing like a fighter against the odds--a caring father (Kramer vs. Kramer), a troubled teenager (Ordinary People), a young cancer victim (Terms of Endearment) or a misunderstood songwriter (Amadeus)--to exalt ! and liquefy...