Word: essays
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Essay on opera [Oct. 8] was truly written "con amore." Bravo! How about an encore...
There is, of course, plenty of dissent from that view. Tolstoy failed to find opera godlike; in fact he found it downright godless. In his essay What Is Art? he gives a withering description of an opera rehearsal and rants against the absurdities he found onstage: "What they were doing was unlike anything on earth except other operas. People do not converse in such a way as recitative, and do not place themselves at fixed distances, in a quartet, waving their arms to express their emotions." In a similar vein, Dr. Johnson called opera "an exotic and irrational entertainment...
...Your Essay on unions [Sept. 17] was interesting, but you are wrong about senior auto workers getting 13 weeks' annual vacation. The maximum is four weeks...
...laud your Essay. At last somebody has defended war as the expedient it can sometimes be in solving international problems. Too many pacifists and bleeding hearts have vilified war in favor of negotiations, when in some cases water, not words, is needed to extinguish fire...
American ways of thinking and being were as fluid and uncertain as the American frontier. Boorstin explores them in an erudite and eloquent essay on the American gift of gab. With verbacious vitality, the growing American language devoured Indian, Dutch, German, Spanish, French and Negro words. Others were invented (caucus, lynch-law, squatter), improvised (sockdolager, spondulix, absquatulate), and embellished (kerflop, kerthump, kersouse). The general exuberance also burst out in political oratory and tall talk ("Bust me wide open if I didn't bulge into the creek in the twinkling of a bedpost, I was so thunderin' savagerous...