Word: duffers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Afterlife and Other Stories by John Updike (Knopf). Again, elder writesman Updike proves his durability by turning out yet another splendid collection of elegant short stories about -- no, no, stay with him -- Wasp geezers who golf. Now and then, unblocked metaphors rise up shrieking: one duffer is resigned "to a golfing mediocrity that would poke its way down the sloping dogleg of decrepitude to the level green of death." Fore? Sure, but Lord, how that senior citizen can write...
...Duffer's Paradise...
...this the ultimate biopic or what? It has all the romantic and celebratory moves of the genre, in addition to which its subject is no bearded duffer moping around a laboratory or gallant, tear-streaked lady belatedly triumphing over a dismal affliction, but a movie star (of sorts) who specialized in doing a highly cinematic thing -- namely a form of kung fu, all lightning reactions and fluid, swirling choreography. Moreover, the movie retains that air of breathless awe and dauntless approval that has always made movie biographies . such a pleasant relief from the gloomy ambiguities of written ones...
...lived as long as Monet, Seurat would have been a hale duffer of 70 when his many heirs, like Mondrian, were coming into their maturity as artists. What would he have left behind him by then? Possibly -- if one can guess from his last big paintings like Chahut, 1889-90, and Cirque, 1890-91 -- something quite different from the calm, composed "Egyptian" classicism of his best-known work, the sublime Un Dimanche a la Grande Jatte of 1884-86. For the last paintings are more frenetic, more consciously urban and, above all, more influenced by mass culture (the posters...