Word: macdonalds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...writing is bright, sometimes biting and provocative. Gore Vidal found John Hersey's Here to Stay "not stimulant, but barbiturate"; Dwight Macdonald wished aloud that Arthur Schlesinger "had never gotten involved with high politics." The Review ignored only what it considered trivial "except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation." Among the reputations it sought to deflate: John Updike's The Centaur ("a poor novel irritatingly marred by good features"); J. D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (he "deals with the emotions and problems of adolescence, and it is no great slight...
...Judy Garland. But nonetheless she is an above-average singer who is also an amusing comedienne and a pretty, been-around blonde with a spooky resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. The resemblance is so spooky, in fact, that she has had to drop Marilyn from her repertory of impressions (Jeanette MacDonald, Shirley Temple, Ethel Merman, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor). Often she looks enough like MM anyway to make spines tingle all the way out to the gaming tables...
Against the American Grain, by Dwight Macdonald'. In a series of engaging essays, a razor-witted critic hews an assortment of U.S. cultural pretensions down to size...
...Midcult, Macdonald believes, is spreading like a "tepid ooze" through American culture. It showed up in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, in which the vivid language of the King James version was pruned away to make easier reading-a feat comparable to "taking apart Westminster Abbey to make Disneyland out of the fragments." Similarly, the Third Edition of Webster's International Dictionary discarded the label "erroneous" for misuse of a word, sanctions any incorrect usage as long as it is common. It calls like, for example, a synonym for as, citing as authority Art Linkletter...
Once a Trotskyite. In the past, Macdonald was best known for his political commentary. After a youthful stint with FORTUNE and The Partisan Review, he started his own magazine, Politics, in 1944 and was its principal contributor. Once (briefly) a Trotskyite, he now proclaimed himself a philosophical anarchist and a pacifist. The times, Macdonald wrote, called for "attention, reporting exposure, analysis, satire, indignation, lamentation." In the five years Politics was published, Macdonald supplied all of these in abundance. Long before it was permitted in liberal circles, Macdonald was an outspoken antiCommunist. Like George Orwell, he directed his fiercest fire...