Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Louis Auchincloss so popular? Gore Vidal claims, in a celebrated essay, that Auchincloss is our great chronicler of the upper classes, "the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs." Perhaps readers have wearied, Vidal suggests, of novelists who insist that only the immigrant story deserves to be told or devote themselves to tedious proclamations of selfhood while ignoring the class whose legend is writ in the Social Register. Despite his considerable failings as a novelist, Auchincloss does for that class what John O'Hara...
...immense diversity of his work. His many projects include studies of the New York subways, tenant farmers during the Depression (Let us Now Praise Famous Men], Chicago streets. Coney Island, Victorian architecture, Cuban scenes and hundreds of photographs documenting roadside stands, interiors and corners of rooms. In his essay "The Artist of the Real," Alan Trachtenberg suggests Evans' work was inspired not by painters or by other artists, but by literature, the writings of Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Whitman and Henry James. "He arrived at his proper point of view through the spirit of objective realism, aesthetic autonomy, respect for feeling...
Illuminations contained pieces on Kafka, Baudelaire, Proust, Brecht and the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In it Benjamin related the development of 20th century mass movements and the mechanical means of mass art. Consider his observations on the film actor as a manipulated prop: "Let us assume," he wrote, "that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without...
...Greeley's latest confection is Everything You Wanted to Know About the Catholic Church but Were Too Pious to Ask (Thomas More Press, $7.95). Greeley simply took 101 words or phrases germane to Catholicism, ranging from Abortion to Wealth of the Church, and dashed off a snappy little essay on each. Sample excerpts...
...there is something more to her use of clay than the immediacy and malleability of the raw material. As the show's guest curator, Hayden Herrera, points out in her warmly sympathetic catalogue essay, clay is "the oldest material for art and an emphatically primitive, even primal substance." (The first sculpture of a man, as every reader of Genesis knows, was made from clay when God modeled Adam.) Clay is earth, and Frank's figures of sprawling nudes and entwined lovers, tenderly dislocated, are clearly meant to be seen as emanations of the earth, concretions of place and appetite...