Word: meres
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...though the conditions that produce great art -- patience, internalization, ruthless self-criticism and an engagement with the authoritative past that goes deeper than the mere ransacking of one's culture for quotable motifs -- have been bleached out of current painting by the glare of its own success. And this success depends as much on the eager passivity of consumers as on the opportunism to which America, besotted with cultural therapy, consigns its talents. No culture needs a hegemony to produce its quota of strong artists; such people do continue to emerge in the U.S. But there is no doubt that...
centerless, devoid of any vision of nature or mastery of hand: at best a mere cultural reflection, at worst...
Anyone caught spying against the Soviet Union is worse than an enemy and deserving of a fate worse than mere execution. After Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in military intelligence, was discovered to be working for the CIA in 1962, he was put to death. The assumption at the time was that he had been shot. Subsequently, however, it was reported that in fact he was hurled alive into a crematorium furnace. Thus, there is a brutal converse of the Soviet Union's adulation of spies who serve its cause around the world...
...information is probably a computer. A study by the Department of Defense Computer Security Center in Fort Meade, Md., concluded that only 30 out of about 17,000 DOD computers are even minimally secure against intrusion by clever hackers. Though no one has ever been caught doing it, the mere thought of Soviet intelligence plugging into Defense Department computers, particularly the ones that command the American nuclear arsenal, is the stuff of Hollywood chillers...
...disguising himself as a wino ("That there is no effective form of defense against a derelict is an irreducible truth of city life"). Even the deposed Prince of Saint Sebastian hustles a string of personal appearances, with the Firm as his agent. But these passages make up a mere fraction of the book. As for the rest, one can only agree with a neighborhood hooker who unburdens herself to Wren after he escapes a bomb planted in his apartment by the Liberation Front. "I don't know, Rus," she says, "sometimes I think it oughta be better than this...