Word: californiaisms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Democrats were thin on the ground at Nixon's party. Hubert Humphrey and Lester Maddox came, but no invitations went to either Edward Kennedy or California's junior Senator, Alan Cranston. On the other hand, Republican Barry Goldwater turned up with his son Barry Jr., 31, newly elected to Congress, who wanted to collect autographs from the astronauts at the head table during dinner. "It's all right," Presidential Special Assistant Dwight Chapin told him coldly. "But if you do, you'll never be invited to another White House function." Young Goldwater desisted...
...million cut in the Pentagon's "emergency fund," an amendment that was opposed by California Conservative George Murphy, who called it "comfortable money" for the military. Answered Maryland Democrat Joseph Tydings: "I would call it luxury money...
...dignity at all. Worse, there is absolutely no trace of Alexandria itself, that city Durrell called "the wine press of love." Fox dispatched a second-string camera crew for a brisk six weeks' worth of location filming, but Cukor shot most of the picture at home in California-on a set that conjured up visions of Sidney Greenstreet-Peter Lorre North African thrillers. The ersatz locale is painfully obvious. "Justine," wrote Cyril Connolly, "is the spirit of Alexandria, sensual and skeptical, self-torturing and passionate." Cukor and his collaborators have raided Durrell's exotic garden and left only...
...same sort of thing is happening to Ross Macdonald, a mystery-story writer of the hard-boiled Southern California school. The Goodbye Look is his 20th book, and it is on bestseller lists -a place where hard-cover mysteries are not often found. In the past few years, critical opinion has been massing behind Macdonald to push him past Dashiell Hammett and especially Raymond Chandler, whose style and settings have clearly influenced him. William Goldman calls Macdonald's mysteries "the finest ever written by an American." Other critics number him among the important novelists of our time, full...
Chandler was also guilty of occasional pontification, but his saving grace was a matter-of-fact, incongruous humor. In Macdonald, the laboring faces and the aura of overhanging doom are intended as symbolic of general existential despair and specific revulsion against California materialism. The trouble is that the symbols are strewn on the page like shorthand glyphs rather than metaphors. As Macdonald used to know, and now seems to forget, the order of imperatives in mystery writing is plot first, red herrings second, and philosophizing last...