Word: paradoxity
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Colwin's prevailing theory--that love is at best a paradox--leads her to a symmetry as incongruously formal as a minuet played backward. Frank and his wife are perfectly partnered in their taste for English cars, Early American sideboards, houses in the South of France and dressy parties. Billy and her husband are a matching pair in their indifference to all of the above. It is the adulterers who are incompatible, an irony at once deliciously comic and far too tidy. When the lovers finally sneak off to an idyllic week in a Vermont cottage, subsisting on passion...
Reading further I find that it is a "minority" faulting the report. What a paradox! Why would one "minority" fault another's claims? Is there dissension? Yes. I refer to one short passage to explain this, as it turns out, helpful paradox...
Much of the criticism leveled at SI's annual swimwear review focuses on the seemingly paradoxical juxtaposition the magazine's usual apple-pie and Chevrolet subject matter with a thinly disguised exhibition of T&A. Unfortunately, however, there is no paradox at all. Sports Illustrated is the propaganda organ of the permanent adolescence of American men: media heroes, big pictures and sports. The list wouldn't be complete without adolescent sexual fantasies...
...paradox of these pictures is that their visual crispness masks the complexity of their message. Avedon's ultrasharp focus seems to promise minute disclosures. His blank backgrounds suggest elemental truthfulness. If this is not a straightforward picture of the West, what could be? But those optical certainties are a tease. Avedon makes that explicit in the foreword to a recently published volume of these pictures (Abrams; $40). "A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture," he writes. "The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part...
...distinction begs a final question. The most extensive shave ever attempted in the research room came in 1975 when, according to 43-year Gillette employee Mary Nagle, an employee came in with "a big grey beard, which had black in it." Apparently driven beyond endurance by the paradox of spending his days making razors while sporting a beard of at least 12 inches (descriptions vary), this man had attempted to end the beard at home, with a TRAC II, but was foiled by the slim extension of the blades. In desperation, Nagle says, he came to the Research Room. Again...