Word: macdonalds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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AGAINST THE AMERICAN GRAIN (427 pp.) - Dwight Macdonald - Random House...
...Dwight Macdonald is a genial tilter at windmills, and in his time he has bowled over more than his share. If occasionally a blade clouts him on the back of the noggin, he is undeterred. He barrels on, filling the conversational air with friendly bellowings and snorts even when he has not formed words ready to his tongue. He can keep an interrupter at bay just by an elongated stammer, disarm the most savage attacker with a high, snuffling whinny, and it sometimes takes the cold light of morning to tell where he went wrong. But he remains...
...Against the American Grain, a collection of essays written over the last ten years, Macdonald argues that American standards are threatened in a new and peculiar way. In times gone by, highbrow culture was clearly distinguished from lowbrow; today the two have been blurred by what Macdonald calls "Midcult." "In Masscult," he writes, "the trick is plain: to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways; it pretends to respect the standards of high culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them...
Presbyopia Solemnizations. Midcult authors, writes Macdonald, exploit the discoveries of avant-garde authors. Thus, their works have an apparent profundity when they are only pretentious. Macdonald's favorite Midcult writers include Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, JP. Marquand, Archibald MacLeish, and even Ernest Hemingway, or at least much of his writing. His prize examples of Midcult are James Gould Cozzens' novel By Love Possessed, with its convoluted prose and jawbreaking Latinisms like "solemnization" and "presbyopic," and Thornton Wilder's Our Town, with its fuzzy philosophizing: "There's something way down deep that's eternal about every...
...Howe is no goal-happy prima donna. "This is a team game, not an individual game," he says, and he often passes off on a power play to Center Alex Delvecchio or Left-Wing Parker MacDonald. Last week Delvecchio topped all Red Wing scorers with 23 points; Howe had 22, MacDonald 20. Coach Sid Abel had no doubt about who was sparking the Red Wings. "As Howe goes, so we go," said Abel, "and we're going fine right...