Word: matter-of-fact
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Compared with that marathon, the talks in Belgrade were swift and matter-of-fact. On Wednesday night the envoys and Milosevic talked for 4 1/2 hours. Chernomyrdin never veered as he read from the prepared script. Ahtisaari went over it in detail, explaining why each demand was not negotiable. "Can we make improvements in the text?" Milosevic asked. "Absolutely not," Ahtisaari shot back. This was NATO's best offer, and not a comma could be changed. Hoping to soften the Finn, Milosevic invited him to dinner. "Let's not have dinner," answered Ahtisaari. Instead, the Serbian leader should go back...
These pieces are, for the most part, Wyoming grotesques. The people are hard, and the view bleak, tending toward melancholy. Brokeback Mountain is a surprise, the matter-of-fact, sorrowing, sketched life of a cowboy and his friend, married men, ordinary sorts, who over the decades never fully realize that they are gay. Real guys aren't gay, because, sex aside, they don't know how to be gay. A story called The Half-Skinned Steer is as grim as its title, and it begins, "In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool...
...back room was full of young writers andtheir wives just home from Paris. They were alltelling stories about Hemingway, who first book hadjust appeared, and they were talking in what Iafterward came to recognize as the Hemingwaydialect-tough, matter-of-fact and confidential, Inthe middle of the evening one of them rose, tookoff his jacket and used it to show how he woulddominate a bull...
...spins into disaster when a welfare agent snaps telephoto pics to expose his outside earnings (Joe paints the agent's car). Mullen's performance is ultranaturalistic and eerily dead-on in a flashback to the bad old days (one of the really few directorial intrusions, narrated in hauntingly matter-of-fact fashion by Mullen...
...then he stops himself, and his eyes become clear and matter-of-fact, and he says, "You know what? I can't lie. I did some things, and I deserve to be here." His father's abuse is part of what he became, he says. "But not a major part." He put himself in prison, he will likely die there, and his mother, who amazes him, is all he has. "Her love transcends whatever obstacle I've thrown in front...