Word: hacks
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...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...
...continued to rebel at Communism's strictures, and this collection of essays and short stories is a gauge of how far they have carried their new independence. The best of these writings are quite profound probings of the human soul; the weakest are a far cry from political hack work...
...once dismissed as a refugee from the Grand Guignol is now widely considered to be Britain's most exciting painter. At 52, Bacon deserves his success, for he has resisted every trend and fashion in art to hack out a path all his own. Though shaped by such old masters as Rembrandt, Daumier and Velasquez ("He haunts me so much I can't let him go"), he has been as much influenced by the here and now of the photograph as by anything else. War, terrorism, gory accidents-these fleeting instants of agony fascinate Bacon. His torn...