Word: clef
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This bluff and vigorous Ford film, based on the Edwin O'Connor roman à clef about four-time Boston Mayor James Curley, winks at the chicanery involved in getting into office and staying there. Spencer Tracy, right, is Frank Skeffington, on his final run for a job he believes is his by divine right. Doing favors, making deals, smiting enemiesto Frank, that's just politics. Has anything changed in 50 years? The big-city machine the film elegizes may be gone, but the malady lingers...
This mentality reminded me of many Harvard students walking confusedly in between the Teach for America and Goldman Sachs booths at the career fair. (Which makes sense, since the author of this thinly veiled roman à clef was a Harvard student and Winthrop House resident.) Like Noah, many feel the weight of the expectations that come with a name brand education...
...figure book deal with Simon & Schuster. In the early 1990s, Stringer says, she was trafficking up to 30 kilos of cocaine weekly to street gangs in Ohio. She was busted and served seven years in prison. When she got out, she self-published her roman à clef Let That Be the Reason--and got nowhere. So she developed a business plan. "I finished the book in 2001, and I sent out letters to over 26 agents and publishers, and no one would touch it," says Stringer. Instead, she self-published. "I just took it to the streets, just trying...
...needs it. Or why the staff is late for the meeting she's moved up the time for. Or why someone dares to propose a feature on enamel costume jewelry when they did the same feature two years ago. If this movie, which is based on a roman a clef by Lauren Weisberger, who once worked in publishing for real-life sacred monster Anna Wintour, had concentrated fully on Miranda's essentially motiveless malignity, it might have been a great black comedy...
...Things Past with a flirtatious male don, for winning him a place at Cambridge. Here he repays the favor with a Proustian portrait of his hero, adding layer upon layer of sometimes miscellaneous information, in vaguely chronological order. Though Proust always insisted his masterwork was not a roman à clef, Davenport-Hines shows the parallels between Proust and his fictional narrator, real figures and the fabricated ones. Born in Paris to a rich Jewish mother and a Catholic physician father, Proust was a nervous, asthmatic child who grew up to be, in Davenport-Hines' phrase, "the most famous valetudinarian...