Word: handmaiden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bezos needed to learn the book business fast. Fate was his handmaiden: the American Booksellers Association's annual convention was set for the very next day in Los Angeles. He flew out and spent the weekend roaming the aisles and taking a crash course in the business. Everything he learned encouraged him. The two big wholesalers for books were Ingram and Baker & Taylor. "So I went to their booths and told them I was thinking of doing this." Books, it turns out, are among the most highly databased items on the planet. The wholesalers even had CD-ROMs listing them...
...every line strikes with ferocious intensity. The drawings can also have a fuzzy and faint quality; crisp lines are smeared into misty shadows and dreamlike figures. A black and white chalk drawing entitled Lady Attended by a Handmaiden, has a hazy atmosphere to it, from no distinct quality but the softness of the graceful lines and gentle curves made by the chalk. Many of the scenes set outside are lazy and unfocused, yet the sun is obviously shining, even though the drawing has been done in black and white chalk...
...Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. This was followed by International Harvester, the farm-equipment trust, and the International Mercantile Marine, the North Atlantic shipping cartel. In fact, Morgan presided over so many large-scale industrial consolidations that he recast the banker's role from that of handmaiden to master of industry...
FACETIOUSNESS. Jokiness is the current handmaiden of brutality. Violent death provides the punch line for the two-hour string of gags that is the modern action movie. And when the stars aren't killing off the supporting players, they are cracking wise--lamely. All right, nobody goes to hear an action movie, but the verbal humor in The Lost World didn't have to be so stilted. In Con Air and Batman & Robin the lines have the rhythm of wit but not the content; they are their own rim shots...
...keeps it up, he could become as rich as Anne Rice. The only thing that may hold him back is his attempt to thicken his plot with serious themes. Pleating the 16th century with the 20th, Codrescu is nervously alert for recurrent patterns of evil and its handmaiden, absolute authority. At the extreme is the countess: "She would ask them to bring her the mirror on the surface of a lake. She would ask them to open their chests and give her their hearts. She would ask them to make gold out of wool." Representing Middle Europe's recent past...