Word: gracelessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...There is a deep sadness in Washington this week. Concern about Jimmy Carter and his Administration has gone beyond anger. The immediate shock of the graceless Cabinet changes will wear off, but doubts about the President will grow even larger and seep out across the world. Ultimately, they are doubts about America...
Understandably, there was a time when Farrell was a lodestar of the non-Communist left. His Studs Lonigan trilogy is a genre classic, a cluttered memoir of graceless Irish poor whose lyricism and potential are crushed in the struggle to survive. H.L. Mencken called their creator "the best living novelist," and Critic Alfred Kazin noted respectfully that "Farrell was the archetypal novelist of the crisis and its inflictions ... all the rawness and distemper of the thirties seem to live in [his] novels...
They are named Phantom Flasher, Lazarus, The Red Onion, Chiquita Vanana, Vandal and such. They ride high and graceless, as always, but now their boxy bodies cry out for attention with garish designs and obstreperous Pap art: frontier scenes, Hawaii schlock, seascapes, erotic mush. Even one-the specimen, say, that flashes nude girls in and out of view with Op-artful magic-can pop the eyeballs. When large numbers heave into sight, zooming along the road in a spaced-out phantasmagoria of a caravan, they can set the innocent motorist to gaping and muttering, "What is going on here...
...least be superbly crafted--taut, gripping, smoothly written, and so forth. The fact is that's simply not it at all. Hailey's books are rather clumsily put together, all in exactly the same way, and while he could never be accused of overwriting his sentences are still graceless, his dialogue wooden, his characters two-dimensional. And his latest book, The Moneychangers, which came out in paperback last month, is a great deal like all his other books. It is about an American institution (banking); it is selling like hotcakes (number one on the bestseller lists); it is the product...
...entertainment here is restricted to people over 21, but no one takes age any more seriously than the pair of kids in Liberty Square. "The World Famous 2 O'Clock Lounge," its facade emblazoned with the graceless silhouettes of dancing women that look like the figures on the Hillbilly Shak at the fair, boasts continual striptease. Women with names like Tiffany Taylor and Sandy Beach parade along an elevated runway inside a long oval bar with the fluid stride of Miss Americas--they just tend to jut their pelvises a little farther forward. Their bodies are shivered by strobe lighting...