Word: fonds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is a very foolish, fond old movie. Written by an aging Graham Greene and directed by an aged George Kukor, it is altogether an old man's work--an embrace of a glamorous era long dead, a last grand grinning caper through it. Whether it lays claims to any purpose beyond sheer diversion is a mystery, and Greene's novel lacks a clue...
...skeptic, and sentiment becomes a gambol. The loops of his freewheeling narrative dip eagerly into the past and circle back a bit crestfallen. And in between, cherished romance turns sappy to the taste and drippy to the nth degree. Cukor has dished out sentiment in order to bid it fond farewell...
...Vietnam is not, as many of its liberal critics would have it, a "quagmire." It is not a "morass." Americans are fond of viewing Asian wars as vast, unintelligible struggles involving numberless hordes of small, identical, machine-like fanatics. This view explains in a comforting way why the Vietnamese have been able to mount such an incredibly strong and tenacious resistance to American domination in South Vietnam...
...have never met, but I have fond memories of hearing you speak during my freshman orientation week and of the joke you told about being tried of sin. I hope you remember the one I mean. It was about a church with a sign in front of it that read. "Tired of sin? Come in!" Then you told us that some sneaky Harvard faculty member painted the following line baneath it. "If not, go to work for the Nixon administration." I'll never be as good a story-teller as you, but I hope I didn't week up your...
...worry. The book is still lull of gems. For those who need definitions of Yiddishisms that have crept into everyday use, Rosten provides examples, many with a fond patina of age: chutzpa is a case of "a man who, having killed his mother and father, asks the court for mercy because he is an orphan, poor schlemiel is a man who "falls on his back and breaks his nose." Some lines are cosmic as well as comic: "The rich have heirs, not children." "Good men need no recommendation and bad men it wouldn't help...