Word: forsworn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...York Times declared: "There is no point wailing about what might have been." Possibly. But that palliative countermands all the earlier sage advice proffered by that selfsame publication, and by this one and by every other voice that lobs words against tanks. The P.L.O. could have forsworn terrorism with words. Britain, Argentina and Israel could have negotiated with words. All took other ways. That may be the abiding basis for dissatisfaction with these two victories; that and the reappearance of the monster nationalism, which, at the slightest chance, turns civilizations back to tribes...
...weapons in the world has conjured such a fear of war that hope and conscience have promoted a countering fantasy: we half persuade ourselves that we have already given up war. The fight in the Falklands seems all the more strange because it ought to be an atavism, something forsworn. It should not be happening...
This is a nostalgia gone delightfully mad, and the reader is happy to inhale it by the cubic yard. But it comes flirtatiously close to novelizing, a practice Keillor claims in a funny preface to have forsworn after one grotesquely bad unpublishable failure. He writes short pieces, he says, in homage to The New Yorker's former great infield of James Thurber, A.J. Liebling, S.J. Perelman and E.B. White...
WITH HER NEW NOVEL, An Indecent Obsession, Colleen McCullough appears to have forsworn the model for guaranteed success she patented four years ago. With The Thorn Birds she proved she knows how to tell a good tale; as soon as her sweeping saga of love and tragedy on the Australian Outback was released, there was no doubt that it would be a hit. Whether you read it with one eye on the kids as they built sand castles on the Jersey shore or saved it to consume during coffee breaks, the epic sucked you in with its portrayal...
...high point of the Boston Early Music Festival and Exhibition, which brought musicologists, performers and instrument makers to the city for a week-long conference on the proper performance of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music. Abandoned now is the practice of booming Bach out of a modern grand piano; forsworn, too, is the "sewing machine" school of Baroque interpretation, which made 500 pieces by one composer sound like the same piece written 500 times. Today's early music specialists have developed techniques and virtuosity that allow them to perform with a freedom of interpretation that was unknown 30 years...