Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lance Morrow's Essay on daydreams [June 28] illustrates a sad fact of modern life. Often we deny our most basic needs and desires by settling for second best. The antiself represents our true instincts before they are crushed by society and forced to retreat to the background...
Habib has put his Middle Eastern background to good use at the bargaining table, impressing his Arab contacts with the few words of Arabic he learned at home and with his knowledge of Lebanese soccer scores. During one tense negotiation some years ago, an Arab leader broke into a string of expletives, which his translator diplomatically glossed over. Habib sat upright, his face split into a wide grin, and he roguishly wagged his finger at the Arab. Said he: "I don't know much Arabic, but I sure do know those words." The Arab leader laughed, warmed by Habib...
...hoped-for patronage of King Philip II, who disliked the fact that the artist's version of the Martyrdom of St. Maurice featured Maurice and his captains in the foreground rather languidly deciding to accept decapitation, while the actual decapitation of their troops was depicted in the background. Thus El Greco managed to exclude himself from two major sources of patronage in Spain, the church and the King...
...properly. When doing a portrait, he contrived a pose that suited his view; if hands diverted attention from face, he would magisterially scumble them over, obliterating the knuckles without any sense of embarrassment. He might pair two saints (St. Andrew and St. Francis) who lived centuries apart, and for background, arbitrarily use a part of Toledo...
...junior). But the autobiographical aspect is more than justified. After Lash was drafted into the Army in 1942, it was obvious to him and to E.R., with whom he exchanged visits, that he was under surveillance. Their reasonable assumption was that this was because of his left-wing background. Not until 1978 did he learn, after demanding to see his FBI and Army counterintelligence files under the Freedom of Information Act, that Army spooks had concluded that the two of them were having a sexual affair. In 1943, moreover, an FBI agent reported hearing at "a social function" that...