Word: note
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...something more than the Western hero transplanted to the city's wilderness. He is not a detached solitary; he is a family man, pleased when his wife tucks a love note into his brown-bag lunch, careful to include both an Eskimo and a butterfly kiss in his little daughter's good-night ritual. Nor is he a man who has educated himself along the trail; instead, he proudly asserts his learning through the punctilious formalities of his manner and diction. Indeed, he is a man whose survival (and killer) instincts are in dire need of on-the-job training...
...decorate his pad) might envy. It may be, in fact, that the blissful look that crosses his kindly face when he lays hands on a rocket launcher in a situation that compels its immediate use is the comic high point of this sequel. Anyway, he provides a high, sweet note of mysterious absurdity that occasionally cuts through the din of a movie that all too resolutely attempts to replicate the comedy megahit of the decade...
...being obvious; a Harbison tune is less a hummable melody than a strongly profiled motif designed to forward the musical argument, not seduce the ear. His structures are sturdy,his orchestration is crisp and clean. Yet this is not the dread "Princeton School" music of baleful repute, the arid note spinning that often characterizes the works of Ivy League composers like Milton Babbitt. Harbison, who as a teenager played jazz piano and who at Harvard led the Bach Society Orchestra, is an academic with a heart...
Vignettes regarding the characters on the other side of the ocean are more effective as they concern the bookstore employees' reactions to Hanff's piquant letters. Each note is anticipated with great glee. The refreshing tone of sentences like "What kind of a Pepys diary is this? This is some editors idea of a Pepys diary" cuts through the tedium of life at 84 Charing Cross Road. With the letters eventually come packages of hard-to-find gourmet goodies from Denmark as a gesture of Hanff's appreciation for the employee's efforts on her part...
...true, as you note in your article on the attempt to make prison sentences more uniform ((LAW, April 27)), that a 10% increase in the prison population over the next decade would be intolerable. But the actual increase could be vastly greater. If just one piece of legislation like last year's drug bill, which calls for stiffer sentencing, is factored in, the increase will be much larger. We simply cannot lock everybody up. Something has got to give. Congress must choose: either allocate many billions of dollars for new prisons, or use imprisonment only where necessary and make greater...