Word: iconoclasms
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...list as miserly and pretentious as the spirit that drew it up. Indeed, working through A Writer's People is rather like listening to the postprandial monologue of a cantankerous old guest at a literary dinner. One is at first amused by all the iconoclasm: After all, why should the reputations of Powell or Chaudhuri matter these days? One then begins to demur: Is Philip Larkin really a "minor" poet? Is the Caribbean really a place of "spiritual emptiness"? Finally one balks completely - at Naipaul's tiresome insistence on referring to the black population of Trinidad as "Negroes," for example...
...Since her unlikely candidacy started gaining steam last year, Royal has had a penchant for saying almost nothing on traditional campaign topics, but launching missiles of iconoclasm where least expected. Earlier this week, she managed the difficult trick of enraging even Canada, when she offered an endorsement of what she called "the liberty and sovereignty of Quebec" after meeting with the head of the separatist Parti Québecois. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded with a brusque reminder that meddling in domestic affairs was "inappropriate for a foreign leader," and Sarkozy's camp could hardly contain its tut-tutting...
...main failing of Rome, a BBC co-production, is that it is more like an expensive I, Claudius than a work of HBO iconoclasm. The visuals are staggering--you see every penny spent--but cosmetic changes aside, it does not rethink its genre as, say, Deadwood did the western. At heart, it is largely a history-book story with familiar themes, enacted by regal men with British accents. One has to wonder what HBO would have had if it had let Deadwood creator David Milch do the more unusual series he once proposed: a drama about ancient Roman city cops...
Whether the iconoclasm of the beat writers is consistent with shoplifting is a different matter. Lamphier notes that the store sells plenty of other books that are considered to be anti-establishment, but that none of these—not even Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book—are shoplifted as frequently as the works of Bukowski, Burroughs and Kerouac...
This is not to say Gore's motivation for the endorsement was entirely negative: he clearly admires Dean's brand of anger. And, yes, they do have similar positions on the war. Gore also loves Dean's consultant-free iconoclasm, the legions of fanatic computer geeks, the sheer energy of the campaign (as opposed to the careful, soporific, consultant-laden nature of Gore's candidacy). For a guy who has spent his life smack-dab in the Washington establishment, the endorsement firmly, and finally, establishes Gore as an outsider...