Word: aper
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...alongside Dickens. Another, smaller book could be made of his observations: "The stomach is really the basis of nationalism." "The infallible test for a gentleman is to drop in on him unfed, and see what he does about it." "Dogs, like very small children, are quite mad." Only one aperçu seems false...
...narrative away from its traditional purpose, i.e., telling what happened next, quickly. By the early decades of this century, serious story writers had pretty much replaced sequence with pattern, events with perceptions. The virtual disappearance of plot from short fiction produced, to be sure, plenty of wispy work, attenuated aperçus evoking the memory of an echo of a sigh. But the masters of the new form understood and met its twin demands: a stringent economy of language fused to a profligacy of inference...
From the outside, celebrity means receiving invitations to all the best parties, swapping aperçus with the noterati and finding beautiful women draped around your calves begging for a one-night meaningful experience. From the inside-of Woody Allen's head-celebrity is all of this, and ain't it awful? It means being introduced to a woman who wrote "the definitive cinematic study of Gummo Marx." It means being offered unproducible scripts, including a musical-comedy treatment of the Guyana massacre. It means being solicited to join committees for Soviet dissidents, to help stamp out leukemia...