Word: pastel
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Grace Paley is a difficult and subtle writer. Her strengths are a peculiar quality and modulation of tone, and an ability to find the telling phrase--even her titles bear their own special attraction. Her sentences are dipped in a faint, pastel irony. Her narrators are people in the process of responding deeply, immediately, and with a fascinating restraint that molds it all into words. The hearts of her stories are less plots than the tense tracing of forces in some encounter--an encounter of people, passions, sensibilities...
MOTHER GOOSE illustrated by Kate Greenaway. Unpaged. Evergreen Press. $2. Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat look a bit like Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb at dinner. But this slender facsimile reprint of selected Mother Goose rhymes does reasonably well by the grainy, graceful, pastel charms of Victorian Illustrator Kate Greena way's 1881 original...
...from the very possibility of consistent and linear thought. Yes, lies in boxes stacked one by one along the ocean in a strip twenty miles long. Neon-emblemed inns and palaces, similar as a strip of concrete dolls notched with the original names of romance glowing from pastel tubes. Aku-Tiki, Capri, Ritz, Rivera, Bali Hai, Lodi. Still the ever more poignant essence remained, barely visible to this feeble romantic shell, his timbers charred by the explosion of the last decade and more recently ravaged by the imperative of honesty unleashed by the uncloaking of lies, the blind rat revealed...
...corporation-lawyer look-three-piece Yale-gray suits, white shirts and club ties-got a credibility rating of 81%; this year the figure plummeted to 57%. Meanwhile, the mod suit with wide lapels and nipped waist worn over a pastel-patterned shirt zoomed upward in credibility from 28% to 63%. Interestingly, those polled were traditionally conservative blue-collar workers earning less than $15,000 a year...
...appearance of abstract art in Disney's work was fleeting. There was the Toccata and Fugue in Fantasia, with its pastel runs of animated Kandinsky. Now and then the studio would come up with an image that, while not really abstract, seems a distant reference to early European constructivism like the gush of music drawn as prismatic blocks issuing from the mouth of a dancing horn in Make Mine Music (1946). And, more distantly still, some of the Disney fantasies do run parallel to themes of high art, without displaying any awareness of their patrician Doppelgängers...