Word: heroicizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...been painted from photographs, whether it was or not, for this is now the natural "look" of most American realism. If the exhibition is littered with homefried parodies of an earlier sublimity, it is because many of the artists could find only a conventional way of producing an "official" heroic landscape. Despite Art Historian Robert Rosenblum's benevolent claim in the catalogue that "in most of these works, the mood is one of exhilarating adventure and head-clearing oxygenation," the paint surface tends to go dead at the timber line: the mountain pictures, like Lowell
...apostate" Catholic who returned to the church after ten years of disowning it. Why? Because I find the whole scene exciting, and my church (defined as community, not hierarchy) just plain heroic...
Cabrera's pessimism and deadpan irony cement these fragments into a book. Whether he is describing some feat of unbelievable bravery, such as peasants armed only with machetes attacking a Spanish cavalry unit, some amazing apathy or some quite ordinary cowardice, he always deflates heroic claims that men control their destiny. Battles are planned with strategy and won by blind chance. So many of these incidents are simultaneously horrible and funny that the reader is only left wondering, or cynical...
Cabrera attacks the Cuban revolution simply by describing selected scenes. He tells of a waiter turned terrorist who becomes a police interrogator, lives in a confiscated mansion, and wins the rank of commander. He recalls some comic and heroic escapes, such as the two men who stowed away in the landing gear of a plane flying to Spain; one of them fell out during the journey but the other arrived eight hours later, half-frozen. The charge that the book spins is guilt by association: the Cuban Revolution was conceived in this tradition of violence and it is essentially...
...most interesting parts of your book are the introductions to each interview, in which you describe your perceptions of the character. These descriptions are sensitive and poetic, especially when the interviewee is someone you liked, or admired: Golda Meir, Dom Camara, Alexandros Panagoulis--people you can portray as heroic. But these sections of the book are also those where you type of journalism reveals itself for what it is: fiction. Each of the 14 people in Interview with History is introduced so that the reader sees the individual as a symbol of something much bigger. Your technique encourages the reader...