Word: neatness
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GOOD LUCK with the motivation behind City of Women, Federico Fellini's latest baroque-nightmare-cum-flesh-fantasy. Food for thought and conversation, perhaps, but it yields no neat, coherent conceptual summary--better just to sit back and savor...
...dare one say it, awfully boring. What's crystalline and well-crafted often leaves one cold. When Helprin's not affecting an especially tedious antique style for telling whispy tales of love lost and childhood winters in Vermont, he proceeds with an eloquent lack of inspiration. Neat shaping of sentences and admirable technical confidence do not make up for a lack of that obscure energy that transforms les mots justes into great writing. In some ways the style belongs to the 18th century when Sam Johnson arbited style, and was always harping on about prudent diction and the dangers...
...Bettmann the sale is not a misty-eyed occasion. "I hate nostalgia," he says, stroking his neat, silver goatee, "but I've made a hell of a living from it." Indeed, one of the nine books he wrote or collaborated on is titled The Good Old Days-They Were Terrible. Bettmann is one of those rare creatures, an optimistic humanist. His belief that the world is not going directly to ruin has led to one of the main reasons for the archive's success: historical pictures add a depth of understanding to current events. Explains Bettmann: "Why show...
...years old, single or childless, with at least a high school education. A reliable employee who has frequent contact with children, perhaps even on the job, and lives in a lower middle-class racially mixed neighborhood. A loner, with few close friends and virtually no sense of humor. Extremely neat. Brought up in a broken home by an abusive mother. May believe it is an act of mercy to kill poor black children and thus remove them from a bad environment. May have expressed condolences to some of the victims' families; may even have attended a funeral...
...seems, is Barry Hannah. There are few writers today who can match Hannah for sheer sustain--for the ability to keep extraordinary excess under control. He resists the usual literary tricks, the epiphanies and the neat endings, the sly references and displays of prodigious learning. Instead he revels in our perversity. He points to the airports, the pimps and the pinups and remains dazzled, amazed, repulsed and fascinated. He distills it all and produces the literary equivalent of grain Alcohol--a genuine Purple Jesus...