Word: mordantly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...crusty moralist in MacDonald -- familiar, especially, from his gratifyingly mordant asides in the Travis Magee books -- finally erupts when Rowan and his wife split up. Rowan castigates the self-sufficient woman his wife has become and complains that he wants his "compliant, noncombative, dependent, absorbed-in-me girl back." MacDonald responds with two long, tough letters describing Rowan's attitude as an "adolescent dream" and maintaining that his celebrity has given him an "iron insistence upon being totally right in all things." After this, does Rowan take MacDonald's well-intentioned scolding to heart and renew the friendship...
...asked a Parisian or a New Yorker in 1886 what sculpture was, the answer (after a short blank stare) would have been: statues. Statuary, to borrow the mordant phrase of Claes Oldenburg many decades later, was "bulls and greeks and lots of nekkid broads." The sculptor of that day was responsible -- as in the age of film, TV and other ways of mass-circulating the visual icon he is not -- for commemorating the dead, illustrating religious myth or dogma and expressing social ideals. The aim and meaning of the work were rarely in doubt. With statues, good or bad, from...
...Baseball Abstract. Though less compelling than some of its nine predecessors, this year's version includes some refreshing observations on the overrating of the Cardinals' rookie outfielder, Vince Coleman, a long and brilliant account of the managerial chess game played at the 1985 world series, and a mordant treatise on the beloved and blinkered manager Chuck Tanner, who somehow failed to notice that his Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse had turned into a drug den (beat reporters, please copy...
Laurie Colwin is a writer in love with writing about love. After six books, including her delicate little lyric of a novel, Happy All the Time, she remains as exclusive to her theme as a troubadour and as mordant as a jester...
With O'Keeffe, vision preceded style, and her works escape the provincial air that clings to some early American modernism ("Colonial Cubism," in Stuart Davis' mordant phrase). Her main stylistic affinities are less with other American or European painting than with photography: the work of Stieglitz, but especially of her friends Paul Strand and Edward Weston, obsessed with sharp focus, clear emblematic shapes of stone, bone and weathered root, the far telescoped into the near. Her America was a more stripped, fundamental and varied place than anything one can find in "regional" painting of the '30s. She made indelible images...