The Last Yugoslav
A review by Richard Byrne
It is one of the most perplexing mysteries of world cinema. In the early 1970s Dusan Makavejev was the brightest star in the avant-garde firmament. A breathless dispatch in the New York Times filed from a midnight screening of one of Makavejev's films at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival offers a glimpse of his glow: Somewhere along in every film festival there comes that one film that electrifies everyone, that sets everyone from the man in the street to critics to the president of a major American company talking about it with the same passionate enthusiasm.... A standing-room-only audience...cheered and screamed and applauded for a good quarter of an hour at 2 o'clock in the morning. Makavejev still surfaces occasionally for retrospective interviews and stints on the film-school and festival circuit, but he has not released a film in fifteen years. His first three features -- Man Is Not a Bird (1965); Love Affair, Or the Case of the Missing...
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Buying Into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World (Pitt Comp Literacy Culture) by Catherine Prendergast
In Metropole, the 1970 novel by Ferenc Karinthy, a linguist named Budai traveling to a conference in Helsinki boards the wrong plane and finds himself in a country whose language, despite all his training, he can't begin to parse. Budai tries out a variety of common languages on hotel staff, with...
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Visit the ruins of Pompeii today, stroll to the famous "Villa of the Mysteries," and you will discover a room of enigmatic frescoes gleaming in the dim light, their crimsons and golds seeming as rich and resplendent as if they were painted yesterday. In a sense, they were: the walls of the room...
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In December 2007, at the annual World Congress on Anti-Aging Medicine in Las Vegas, Suzanne Somers, the actress and bestselling author of Ageless: The Naked Truth About Bioidentical Hormones, delivered a rhapsodic keynote speech in praise of hormone replacement therapy. "I go to these parties...
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Almost any fable of the artist's life could take its title from the novel about the life that Balzac wrote, and that stands as a model for the rest: Lost Illusions. Yet Balzac may have been too optimistic. Showing his would-be poet Lucien Chardon seduced by his social ambitions and undefended by...
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I can't remember the first time I read Merce Rodoreda's The Time of the Doves. It might have been when I was 13, living with my family in the high-rise suburbs of Madrid. It might have been when I was 17, back in Madrid with my mother for a few weeks in a sweltering rented room. Or it might have...
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In October 2003 employees at more than 800 chain supermarkets in California walked out of their jobs after management demanded pay cuts and a reduction in health insurance benefits. The ensuing strike and lockout were notable for the number of workers involved (59,000), the duration of the conflict ...
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Clarice Lispector doted on the ugly, dull and superfluous. Over the course of her fifty years as a novelist, her characters became less intelligent. She began with self-conscious and lonely heroines and moved on to less pensive creatures: dogs, chickens, cockroaches and the smallest woman in the...
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"Garcia Marquez is like a head of state," Fidel Castro has remarked. "The only question is, which state?" The comment starts to take us into what's unique about its subject's work and life -- not least because of who delivered it. No other writer in our time has operated on so vast a scale. None...
Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens
In the fall of 1936, after a decade of not doing so, The Nation sponsored a poetry prize. Of the 1,800 poems submitted, said the editors of The Nation, "the overwhelming majority were concerned with contemporary social conflicts either at home or abroad." The winning poem, Wallace Stevens's "The...
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