Word: flat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lecture hall. Their writing is unoriginal, occasionally sloppy, and often repetitive. Facts overlap; the same figures reappear in separate essays, with the same glib descriptions: President John T. Kirkland is always "charming," President Charles W. Eliot is "the right sort," George Santayana is eccentric. All of the characters are flat. The authors, some of whom are quite popular for their lively lecture styles, seem to have thrown these essays together on a free weekend, using whatever information was easily available...
...profusion of rich colors but daydreams about the frail hands of her dying mother: "I traced with my finger the huge, adult bones, the fascinating veins that crossed it like mysterious rivers; I fitted my attention exactly to the ridgings of her knuckles, the wedding ring, her pale, flat nails." Not a false note sounds in these recordings of sorrow and sudden grace. Deborah Eisenberg's characters are a unique amalgam of the brave and antic; they regard difficulties seriously, but not themselves. In their perceptions and urban locutions, they might be the daughters of J.D. Salinger's women...
...plastic means. His sources are largely those of Pop art: the quickly seen, iconic, coercive imagery of mass media, which he then modifies and softens with high-art references. His main subject is the human face, close up and cropped by the frame, a pearly or tanned mask of flat paint with schematic shading, great swacking eyelashes and lipstick-colored lips: it is the face of advertising, the size of an image on a '50s highway billboard shifted into the context of domesticity. Much of the time the face belongs to his wife Ada, whose liquid brown, slightly melancholy eyes...
...Honduras, Mexico City Bureau Chief Harry Kelly took the final leg of his journey to the Nicaraguan border aboard a U.S. Chinook helicopter. Like Allis, he found himself flying on the lining of his stomach. "Chinooks ride like New York subway trains going flat out," says Kelly. By week's end, however, all the careering about had got the correspondents safely to their destinations -- and got the story...
Landing a job at the new Mazda auto plant in Flat Rock, Mich., will be something like getting into an Ivy League college, only tougher. About 130,000 workers have applied for 3,100 production slots at the Japanese company's first U.S. factory, which will open in 1987. Applicants first had to present their qualifications by mail. Selected job seekers will now undergo in person an unusually exhaustive battery of tests that will rate their reading, verbal, mechanical and problem-solving skills. They will also be tested for the presence of drugs in their systems...