For starters, I'm not sure what The Familiar is about, a remark I find amusing coming out of my mouth, being the kind of reader who usually loathes tropes like plot, character, setting, epiphany, meaning.
James Joyce talked of epiphanies - meaning the sudden flashes of truth that come in the lighting of a cigarette or the scratching of a pimple.
What in her journey -- her epiphanies, her experiences, her example -- holds meaning for those of us who are left behind?
As a standup comedian before making the switch to TV in the late 1980s, Carter recounted his near-death epiphany in "Heavy Breathing," a monologue about God and the quest for meaning.
Paul had his monetary-policy epiphany on Aug. 15, 1971 - the day the Federal Reserve shut its "gold window," meaning foreign governments could no longer trade gold for dollars at the fixed rate of $35 an ounce.
And "Who'll Stop the Rain?," which was Fogerty's equivocal response to Woodstock — he remained suspicious about the process of generational epiphany, worried that searching for meaning was longer and more arduous than youth culture anticipated — gets a toweringly empathetic reading from Fogerty and Bob Seger.
And "Who'll Stop the Rain?," which was Fogerty's equivocal response to Woodstock he remained suspicious about the process of generational epiphany, worried that searching for meaning was longer and more arduous than youth culture anticipated gets a toweringly empathetic reading from Fogerty and Bob Seger.
(The date is not arbitrary: Joyce secularised the meaning of the word "epiphany" in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in this story the protagonist Gabriel's experience is, in the Joycean sense, epiphanic).
Well, a slow epiphany, which sort of defeats the entire meaning of "epiphany," but I've used the word so now I'm sticking with it.
But a Ruscha's soulless lettering and freshman-year architecture renderings conspire to dumb down the possible meanings rather than deliver an epiphany of open-ended possibilities.
