Word: agee
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
literature. Americans have been especially obsessive about doing things by the book: democracy has always involved the ambivalence of men and women hell-bent upon being superior to their equals. In the exuberantly crass moneygrubbing of the gilded age after the Civil War, for example, Americans were springing literally out of ditches into great wealth. The trajectory that their money purchased into ostentation, if not aristocracy, gave them all kinds of anxiety attacks. And so the etiquette-book business flourished, scores of manuals pouring forth to soothe and lead the nouveau riche nervously forward to some kind of presentability. Some...
...masculine urge to rise when a woman entered the room seemed a sort of humiliating impulse, uncontrollable, incontinent. A man seated on the downtown bus might endure agonies of self-examination before offering his seat to a woman. The male had to learn to size up the female by age, education and possible ferocity of feminism before opening a door for her: Would the courtesy offend her? It made for ambiguity: If a man studiously refuses to open the door for a woman, is he sexually liberated? Or just an ill-bred slob...
...Americans really need all of this advice? In any age, most of the interest in manners is casually voyeuristic rather than urgently practical. Manners are entertaining, inherently dramatic. Taken all together, they present a sort of shimmering petit-point likeness of a society. Especially now, in an era of broad transition, manners tend to be brittle and sparky?the friction of an older system being rubbed against by an abrasive future...
...painful, it is also un necessary. Straitjacket rules imposed by a bulging bureaucracy lift unemployment, slow technical progress, reduce U.S. competitiveness in the world, hamper exports and thus further weak en the dollar. The imperial regulatory juggernaut has clearly gone too far and, in an inflationary and recession-threatening age, the nation can no longer afford the luxury of costly and in efficient Government control...
...gloomily expected to die young, like Seurat or Beardsley. In fact he lived on to a great age, until 1944; but the main themes of his work were all set forth well before World War I, and it is on the period from 1880 to 1914 that the show concentrates. Few painters have had more difficult beginnings than Munch. They might have crushed his talent; instead they gave it a permanent irritability. His family was sunk in a kind 'of permanent neurasthenia, the petit-bourgeois provincial twilight known to every reader of Strindberg or Ibsen. He was, almost literally...