Word: conceits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Curiously, all three women enter into friendships with Zenia entirely aware of her reputation. This principal conceit is the most glaring flaw in this generally good novel. Even Charis, resident healer and spiritual expert, who judges people based upon their aureal colors, can't seem to tell when Zenia's automatically destructive powers are levelled at her. At one point, these are described as "waves of ill will flow[ing] out of her like cosmic radiation...
...faith that Rodgers and Hammerstein were geniuses. Ethel Merman's voice was powerful, sure, and powerfully annoying. Each new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical seems like an ice show putting on airs, Siegfried and Roy with bathos. To a majority of people under 50, I'm convinced, the formal conceit of musicals (a so-so play during which the actors inexplicably sing their hearts out every 10 minutes) is both corny and surreal, like some unpleasant crossbreed of Salvador Dali and Norman Rockwell. We don't buy it, and we haven't bought it since Mary Poppins. Our disbelief refuses...
...cloning became common, then sex -- along with male and female genders -- would be unnecessary. That's the conceit of books such as Charles Eric Maine's World Without Men (1958) and Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet (1959). Conversely, cloning might be a device for preserving love. The 1991 British TV miniseries The Cloning of Joanna May, based on a Fay Weldon novel, is about a man who dumps his unfaithful wife -- but only after cloning her so he can replace her with her twin a few years down the line...
Statesmen preen with the conceit that they can alter the forces of history and cool the passions of humanity with their bold leadership or clever diplomacy, and on occasion they do. But in the case of ingrained historic hatreds, true change can come only from the volition of the peoples involved. For reasons that can be explained by hardheaded circumstance -- though not fully understood -- men wake up one morning exhausted by their enmity and replace it with more rational considerations, a resetting of the psychic gyroscope that finally counts the cost of hatred too high. From that point, peace...
...walls or (with more fetishistic suggestion) on women's shoes. No doubt to spare the clothes of the museum audience, these stay switched off, leaving dried Abstract Expressionist trickles as mementos. Peacock Machine, 1982, was originally seen spreading its tail in a formal- garden gazebo -- a charming conceit...