Word: clever
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...That's much more important to know," he says, "and besides, I figure we'll wear seat belts anyway." He hooked up another switch to a fan, so he can cool his engine in heavy traffic, but otherwise he hasn't meddled with the European engineering, which seems clever...
WHEN A NEW Japanese product comes onto the American market, its skillful design, its inexpensiveness, and its dubious durability are matched only by its clever advertising. Frank Gibney, the author of a forthcoming book, Japan, The Fragile Superpower, wrote recently that "the Japanese continue to maintain that a good Japanese can outsell Americans, outplan Frenchmen and Germans, and even 'handle' the Chinese." But the time for a philosophy of Mom, apple pie, and the transistor radio next door is gone. Japan is suffering from foreign economic pressures and its future is bleak, even on the everconsuming American market...
What do "those clever Japanese" industrialists and Japanese writers' numbers games have to do with Kobo Abe? Everything (and of course, on the edge of the technological abyss, nothing). Abe is a Nikon camera incarnate, and his transistorized prose--a mixture of journalese and clinical report--combines some of the worst elements of the simple Hesse, the technical Barth, the mundane Beckett, and the grotesque-for-the-sake-of-grotesqueness Barthelme. He is as throughly modern as Japan's prodigal-car, the high on fuel consumption and low on credit...
...Administration, and until Pompidou appointed him Foreign Minister in 1973, he had spent his entire career as a bureaucrat. He is quiet, shakes hands with a stiffness in his right arm from a war wound, and rarely smiles, except for a tight-lipped grin after he has made a clever...
When Sheed is not dashing off social history as clever cartoons, he is apt to be carving out aphorisms: "As with God in the late Middle Ages, all that there is to know about the Mafia seems to be known by now except whether it actually exists." God keeps coming up again and again in Sheed's text except, of course, in an essay on the church in which he points out glumly that "sex had long since become more interesting than God" to American Catholics...