Word: hacking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Small Ripple. He now describes the term Angry Young Men as "a journalistic label that is meaningless." The writers so described, he says, are actually artists who deal in social protest but do not hack at it; they symbolize no social revolution. "I wish there were a social revolution in England." he says, "but there hasn't been a ripple...
Sometimes Rossini wrote good operas poorly; sometimes he wrote bad operas well. The mind of a genius and the soul of a hack confronted him like matched pistols, and under the guns, he once wrote 28 operas in ten years. But now and then while on vacation from himself, Gioacchino Rossini wrote a great opera, and at such times there was no one like him The glory of this man." wrote Stendhal in 1823. "is only limited by the limits of civilization itself; and he is not yet 32." That same year Rossini pushed civilization's limits back...
...from a long line of Southern naval officers, Upton was a boy wonder. He was still in short pants and scarcely through his freshman year at New York's City College (he entered at 13) before he had written his first novel. At his peak, his output of hack work and potboiling romances reached a sizzling 8,000 words a day. Of the many millions of words he wrote, few are the right ones in the right order, but some defect of ear, taste or intelligence mercifully protected him from knowing this...
...never knew you had a brother, Howard," says Lady Cicely Waynfleet to her brother-in-law, Sir Howard Hallam, in the first act of CAPTAIN BRASSBOUND'S CONVERSION. And Howard answers (unpardonably): "Perhaps because you never asked me." It's like that all the way through three long acts: hack-work by a great playwright Shaw's intention, no doubt, was to present a series of unjust sentiments in elegant language, but all that he actually achieved was a preposterous plot, a smattering of coy jokes and wheezy epigrams, and a brace of cardboard characters (there's even a comic...
...local premiere, and the fact that it had never been played in Boston before, in all its 153 years, was curiously comforting to me as I listened to its first performance, Mehul was a composer of small imagination and only indifferent technical competence, and his symphony contains little but hack work. The orchestra seemed to like it, though, and they managed to play the first three movements in decent enough fashion. Their attack was spirited and lively, their intonation misleadingly good; only their dynamic shadings were not what they might have been: most of the piano passages melted into thin...