Word: constructive
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most of the movie takes place during one awful night in the sleepless imagination of a dying novelist (played with fierce relish by John Gielgud). Trying to construct a final fiction, his mind keeps moving his son (Bogarde), his son's wife (Ellen Burstyn), his bastard progeny (David Warner) and his own dead wife (Elaine Stritch) around a mythical country. His vision of his dear ones is, to say the least, misanthropic. They are cold, loveless creatures, incapable of responding to one another except by lobbing epigrams, Wildean in rhythm but not in wit, back and forth...
Working with a grant from the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association, Fish is drawing partly from the Asian martial arts to construct a new kind of athletic program dealing with things like muscle awareness and concentration...
...book, Gardner notes that pseudo-scientific theories are sometimes the work of brilliant men who can construct quite intricate puzzles for others to undo. Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian Institution makes the same point about Fell's work: "Fell spends years putting together his information...He's constructed an elaborate puzzle for us to solve...Recently I spent a couple of hours with a reporter and we looked up several of these words [from Fell's lists comparing ancient European languages and modern Indian tongues]...they can all be refuted, but in the end it's a waste of effort...
...setting the literati of America and the British Isles on fire, in far-off Alexandria, Egypt, a poet who is just now receiving the recognition due a major literary figure was fashioning his own "mythical method." Constantine P. Cavafy, the poet of "Greeks in exile," had begun to construct his corporate poetic statement a dozen years before Eliot's review, and in isolation from the rich literary interchange of artists in the West. Cavafy published for a very select audience during his lifetime--and translations of his work into English were rarer still. When Cavafy died...
Urban Machine. To the chagrin of some Parisians, the competition was won by two foreigners, Italy's Renzo Piano and Britain's Richard Rogers. In the midst of Beaubourg's crumbling brick and mortar, they proceeded to construct what they called a "living urban machine." They planned a six-story building to be formed literally inside out -structural supports on the outside, along with a formidable array of ducts, gantries, movable mezzanines and color-coded pipes for heating, electricity, air conditioning and fire control. Attached to one external facade is a huge escalator with transparent walls, illustrating...