Word: maximalism
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Ogni dipintore dipinge se, a Renaissance maxim ran: every painter paints himself. Steinberg's peculiar achievement has been to render this maxim, pruned of all expressionist content. What obsessively concerns him is the idea that each drawing remakes its author: it is a mask. The self-made artist is one of his favorite motifs, and certainly his most famous one: a little man grasping the pen that draws him. In this "self-portrait," artist and motif are fused, locked in a permanent logical impossibility that is also an ambition of poetry: Myself I will remake...
...liquid gray eyes and budding prow of a nose beneath a military cap ? but, as Stein berg remembers it, "my education, my reassurance, my comportment came out of reading literature. I found my real world, and my real friends, in books." At ten, "much too early," he read Maxim Gorky; by twelve, he was devouring Crime and Punishment; from France, there were heavy doses of Jules Verne, Emile Zola and Anatole France, "whose boulevardier quality was amazing...
...although it's almost a maxim in Greene's world that cynics will always be cynics, the novelist usually does try to convince us that under their hard shells his anti-heroes really do want desperately to believe. If not in politics or in love, (at least not for long), then in religion and the afterlife. The place they perpetually go in Greene's novels to quaff their spiritual thirst is the Catholic Church; and if their inability to take God seriously keeps them from having faith, at least they can while away their time feeling guilty. The most successful...
...Lebanon strike reflected a Weizman maxim. "Israel," he has remarked, "is condemned to fight from time to time. She has to plan her wars more carefully than any other country and achieve all her targets in a very short time." In closed meetings, he has added that "Israel under Begin's rule and myself at the defense desk will not absorb the first strike but will take the pre-emptive strike...
...Donny's sometime-assistant and partner in petty crime. Donny's theory is somewhat simplistic, summarized in the phrase "Action talks and bullshit walks." The point of this diatribe seems to be that everyone must look out for themselves. Stuart Burney's Donny seems painfully aware of this maxim, finding it distasteful, perhaps, but true. Burney lends an air of realism to his character; his Bonny is like thousands of backstreets city kids aware of the odds against them and unable to score anything more than marginal victories against the system that keeps them in place...