Word: john
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...title of the recent Brooklyn Museum of Art show) and debate not the subtleties of high craftsmanship but the appropriateness of public funding--talk about power!--for works that large segments of that public, not all of them ignoramuses, deplore. Strolling the latest Venice Biennale, novelist (and art critic) John Updike observed that it was nearly impossible to find anything that "reminded one of art in the old sense, even in the older modern sense," since "the desire to shock...had become veritably frantic...
...face will do to traditional narrative. They'll speed it up, scramble it--and render it in new tonalities, using new palettes. You can see it in the way Pulp Fiction or Run Lola Run toys with time, in the down-the-rabbit-hole goofing of Being John Malkovich, in Keanu Reeves' encounter with that manic bullet in The Matrix. It's a kind of back formation from computer language, this narrative revolution manifesting itself in film. But it surely partakes of the new machine's ability to cast us adrift in ungrounded cyberspace, where all the spatial and temporal...
...common touch, able to rouse a crowd or charm a citizen. She had flattering portraits painted and copies widely distributed. She encouraged balladeers to pen propagandistic songs. Her marvelous mythmaking machinery cultivated a mystic bond with the English people. "We all loved her," wrote her godson Sir John Harington, "for she said she loved...
...scientist, agriculturalist, philologist and more. His only presidential rival in versatility of intellect was Theodore Roosevelt. Though Jefferson wrote only one book, Notes on the State of Virginia, he was a magnificent writer and tireless correspondent. He left behind an astonishing 18,000 letters, including his memorable correspondence with John Adams. (Adams and Jefferson died on the same day, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence...
...truths that Jefferson famously declared to be "self-evident" were not new. He drew his ideas from an extraordinarily wide range of reading, especially from the works of Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke, and from the Scottish moral philosophers--Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, David Hume, Adam Smith...