Word: blur
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...before had a major power so openly used overwhelming force to extract concessions at the conference table, or moved so swiftly from diplomacy to war and back; the episode almost evoked the end of the Thirty Years' War, when fighting and negotiating accompanied each other in a dizzying blur. The news of the bombing halt was as puzzling as it was welcome. Nixon had broken off the peace talks in anger at what he regarded as Hanoi's intransigence. He had sent the bombers north on a scale greater than any in the long war to force...
...town" of Valencia-they set a standard of originality and excellence for the nation. When the plans are bad, which is all too often, they result in garish commercial strips, sleazy subdivisions and industrial parks that have already turned much of the once bright land into a gray blur...
...COURSE, talk only of Updike's themes and characters. In Museums and Women he succeeds in restoring completeness to our view of the physical world, threatened and impaired by the generalizing blur of communications media, through precise description; and, if his characters muse or mediate, he follows them with the fluidity of a writer who was welded his intellect, insight and emotion into vision. In his less serious pieces he is sometimes simply very funny, filling in the words to a dinosaur tea-party or chronicling the invention of the horse-collar. But his artistic effectiveness derives mostly from...
...Balzac's Los: Illusions in Zola's Nana rise above the roar of traffic down in the street. Thin urban, and afflicted with nervous habits, the reader has to "put on spectacles" (and, with rare exceptions, defective in such natural endowments, he does wear spectacles) to reduce the blur which contemplation of the world produces. In literature there is an order which is absent elsewhere; in the poem, stanzas erect an imagined realm exclusive of chaos. The reader, whose desperate activities I've compared to those of an addict, turns to the Cantos with regret; he would rather read...
Miss Frame's persistent themes are loneliness, madness and death. But again, as in dreams, distinctions dissolve and the themes can be interchangeable. In Daughter Buffalo, billed as her first novel with an American setting, even the characters seem to blur into each other. Talbot Edelman, M.D., is a self-acclaimed student of death whose inquiries include mutilating experiments on his dog Sally. A lyric-writing old gent named Turnlung is also an expert-a virtual memory bank of death and that other equable state, prenatal life. Both Talbot, the death scientist, and Turnlung, the death artist, develop...