Word: dead
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Perhaps that's because the universalist desire to reform all culture, make everyone see in a new way, is dead. What's true of literature is true of all the arts now: there are readers of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, there are Michael Crichton's readers, and the twain don't meet. Except, possibly, theoretically in cyberspace. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right: "Culture follows money." And the money--perhaps even the creative zeal--is now in the new media. A radically reshaped culture is beginning to be created there. We can already begin to see what the generation born...
...England. When Harold, having defeated the Scandinavians, rushed south again with 7,000 troops, William was outside Hastings. "For God's sake, spare not," he told his men. His well-deployed knights and archers eventually overwhelmed the exhausted Anglo-Saxon infantry. "The living marched over the heaps of the dead," wrote an early historian. By nightfall, Harold was slain...
That figure was Saladin. It is testament to his extraordinary stature in the Middle Ages that not only was Saladin the sole "modern" mentioned--he had been dead barely 100 years when Dante wrote--but also that a man who had made his name successfully battling Christianity would be lionized by the author of perhaps the most Christ-centered verse ever penned...
...First?" is not only the century's most famous comedy bit; it's also the best. It's absurdism mixed with the easy pleasure of confusion, and Bud Abbott plays the perfect cool logician to Lou Costello's frustrated inquisitor in this Beckettian farce. RUNNERS-UP "Dead Parrot," Monty Python; "Rope Tricks," Will Rogers...
Cartier-Bresson demonstrated the strange magic in moments in which nothing much happens but all sorts of things are revealed. RUNNERS-UP Identifying the Dead, Russian Front by Dmitri Baltermants; Wall Street by Paul Strand