Word: gentleman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...could see the work of Rubens, Van Dyck and Claude. He rapidly learned to deal with the social mask. Those pink, smooth, patrician egg faces, the men a little knobbly of jaw and hooded of eyelid, with their "cold pleasant stares" (as Henry James would say of the English gentleman) are emblems of sensibility and composure, not of emotion. Now and again a very slight hint of irony seems to intrude, but one may be fairly sure that one's own 20th century ideas, not Gainsborough's 18th century intentions, place it there...
...grave lies buried the secret of his story." And yet ... and yet ... the Londoner Leon Garfield, 59, hitherto a writer of juveniles, composes his own conclusion to Edwin Drood, including Antony Maitland's new illustrations, happily capturing the Master's locutions: "Curious, bland, yet deeply various gentleman ... he was very like a convert to a new faith, who walks in the ways of the Lord with such assiduity as to obliterate His footsteps entirely...
...Saturation Reporting," as Wolfe called it, was the crucial innovation. If the writer could move inside (and sometimes in with) his subject so that the two of them felt absolutely natural together, only then could the journalist begin to unearth the story. The Literary Gentleman With A Seat in the Grandstand gave way to George Plimpton playing football with the Detroit Lions. Novelists fumed. But some signed up, people like Gore Vidal, William Styron and especially Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, who began to use journalistic techniques in their writing...
...hook worked its way in deeper when Carl also stumbled into science fiction. He was especially taken with the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote of sensuous princesses, six-legged beasts of burden, evil warlords and a Virginia gentleman named John Carter, who miraculously transported himself to the Red Planet simply by gazing at it. The dark-eyed youngster, looking up at the night sky from a Brooklyn lot, tried vainly to follow his hero into space. It was a dream that Sagan has never forgotten. Phobos, the name of one of the moons of Mars, now appears...
...little lady. He's not. He's a middle-aged shlemiel of an accountant-a surly, sulky Bob Newhart-with a restless young wife and a fatal case of paranoia. Lillian (Deborah Harry) thinks she's Betty Bacall: purple nightgowns, lots of makeup and suggestive patter, gentleman friend on the side. She's not. She's a housewife who cannot keep house, and whose only escape from her drab apartment is a weekly movie matinee with the superintendent (Everett McGill). O.K., her Mongol cheekbones do suggest a touch of fashion-model class. True, the young...