Word: lumpishly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nose. I am reminded of the young woman who had the misfortune to be with Nelson Rockefeller when he suffered a fatal heart attack. Wisely, she fled the press hounds, but the only picture of her that photo editors could find to run incessantly made her look rather lumpish. I could imagine her, safe in some unused summer house, fighting the temptation to return just long enough to get a more flattering picture into the record...
...even as they compel admiration and even a certain awe. This group of 14 stock nudes gathered around what must have been a picnic basket is as resolutely antisensuous as an assembly of naked women could possibly be. Some of them look like seals stranded on rocks. Others are lumpish giantesses. None were painted from actual models because, as his friend the painter Emile Bernard recalled, "he was the slave of an extreme sense of decorum, and...this slavery had two causes: the one, that he didn't trust himself with women; the other, that he had religious scruples...
...slyness are the driving forces of Hoeg's first novel, The History of Danish Dreams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 356 pages; $24), which has now been issued in the U.S. That said, there's not much similarity between the two novels. Smilla has a powerful narrative flow; Dreams is a lumpish absurdity that fuddles to a halt after several dozen pages, begins again with new characters and repeats this throat clearing until well past the book's midsection. In these first chapters Hoeg tries something like magic realism, then gives up a promising experiment...
...speak, more muted and pastoral: harmless scratches, small obscenities, chalk on Roman distemper. To adopt graffiti to the painted canvas was to pay homage to European art informel -- Fautrier, Wols and especially Jean Dubuffet. Their influence plays on Twombly's earliest paintings of the 1950s, with their lumpish glandular forms, the movement of the paint slowed up by mixing it with earth but then accelerated by a nervous, hairy scratching around the edges...
Aspin's problems had as much to do with his lumpish style as his policy positions. Rather than narrowing the cultural gap between the Oval Office and the war rooms, Aspin seemed to symbolize it. To the creased uniforms at the Pentagon, Aspin's rumpled suits and looping, ruminative pronouncements made him seem tweedy and hapless. Oddly for a man who first came to the Defense Department in the mid-1960s as one of the chart-toting whiz kids ushered in by Robert McNamara, Aspin was poor at organizational matters. In a place accustomed to firm decisions and stopwatch timing...