Word: flesh-and-blood
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Family Jokes. The question arises: Why has Powell's splendid fictional achievement not won wider popularity in the U.S.? Some British critics feel that the difficulty lies in unfamiliarity with the moods and mores of the British upper classes. Others suggest that some acquaintance with the flesh-and-blood originals of Powell's fictional characters is necessary to savor his prose. But would it really help to know that Moreland, the intelligent musician who provides such a sparkling commentary on this world, was perhaps drawn from Composer Constant Lambert, or that the vastly comic Widmerpool was lovingly conjured...
...quote is from Carlos Fuentes' novel Where the A ir Is Clear. The speaker is a former Mexican revolutionary who has turned businessman. Emiliano Zapata, a flesh-and-blood revolutionary with the unappeasable single-mindedness of a saint, no doubt would have spat at such words. He was a horse trainer and farmer who led the land-hungry campesinos of Mexico's south-central state of Morelos during the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. To Zapata opportunists like the character in the Fuentes book were cabrones(s.o.b.'s). "As soon as they see a little chance...
...magical objects reports that "crystal balls are selling like popcorn" for as much as $23 apiece. New York's TBS Computer Centers Corp. now cranks out 20-page personal horoscopes for a mere $15, the electronic brain taking only a minute to compute a life history that flesh-and-blood astrologers need a week to prepare. Necromancy, the art of communication with the dead, has undergone a rebirth, abetted by California's Episcopal Bishop James Pike, who engaged in a seance at which he claims to have talked with his suicide...
Pudding Faces. In an artistic sense, Master E.S. was handicapped. He knew nothing of the magical discoveries in perspective being made at the time in Florence by Piero della Francesca. His was strictly a two-dimensional world. As if straining to portray flesh-and-blood emotion, he gave his people big noses, pudding faces, puffy eyelids, and the result was often close to caricature. He himself was not capable of the profound humanity expressed by Flanders' Rogier van der Weyden, nor does his dry decorative line even suggest the sublimely anguished figures of his countrymen to come...
Admiral David McDonald, chief of naval operations, recently returned from Viet Nam, translated this argument into flesh-and-blood terms last week. "The bombing," he reported, "is substantially slowing down the infiltration of men and supplies into South Viet Nam, and the slowdown has saved an awful lot of lives of Marines and Army soldiers on the ground." The price of another long pause would thus be prohibitively high unless the other side responds in kind. From Hanoi to date there has been only silence on this score...