Word: dictums
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Bertolt Brecht, who plucked plots from Shakespeare, Moliere and Farquhar, reportedly said the best writers never borrow; they always steal. Brecht's error was limiting his dictum to the best writers. The rest are equally ready to find inspiration where someone else found it before. This is especially true of writers of musicals: attempts at original stories have become all but unheard of. With six weeks left, the '80s have yet to yield a noteworthy American musical not derived from another source, whether fiction (Big River), folklore (Into the Woods), movies ("Nine") or a painting (Sunday in the Park with...
Abroad, Bush tends to turn Teddy Roosevelt's famous dictum on its head by speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. He did offer important new proposals on conventional-force reductions in Europe. Otherwise, he has allowed the Kremlin to trump him with a variety of strategic-arms offers, while he nonchalantly dusted off Dwight Eisenhower's "Open Skies" plan (to allow each superpower overflight inspections of the other's territory) and suggested a reduction in chemical weapons that Congress had long since ordered him to make. His offer of economic assistance to Poland and Hungary, as they attempt...
...INNOCENT until proven guilty" is a dictum that increasingly applies only to accused rapists. Those who bring charges against their attackers, on the other hand, seem to be easily and legally punished, without trials and juries...
...first axioms American reporters learn is that a fender bender on Main Street is bigger news than a train wreck in Pakistan. Just as Tip O'Neill crystallized electoral wisdom in his dictum "All politics is local," many editors seem to have concluded that all journalism should be local too. Reportage from distant places tends to be limited to the melodramatic and gauged by personal relevance: either the it-could-have-been-me human-interest factor or the larger-implications factor of how, although the news consumer was untouched by a particular event, similar ones in the future might have...
Hwang is keenly aware of the F. Scott Fitzgerald dictum that American lives have no second acts, that youthful success leads to mid-life burnout and embitterment. A few months after M. Butterfly opened, he and avant-garde composer Philip Glass mounted 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, a multimedia oddity that proved too abstruse for the masses yet too tabloid for intellectuals; it centers on an apparent close encounter with aliens from space. In multiple productions it showed scant commercial potential. In addition to the screenplay for M. Butterfly, which Hwang will write himself, he is working on three other...