Word: pilings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Exotic Nile," the narrator is hoodwinked by his landlord into taking his wife's younger sister out to dinner because "She's young, but she's not that young, and she likes you." "[Did] You get him?" the girl asks her brother on reappearing and they all pile into her convertible, where she proceeds to climb all over the narrator...
...sounds like a terrible mess, but it does not cook out that way, for two reasons. The first is the strength of Alexander's imagery; the second, his formal control. Since most neoexpressionist painting is given to conventional signs for intensity but lacks formal rigor (a gut pile without shape), Alexander's work repays inspection...
...insist and insist again by Vague Generalities. We abhor V.G.'s, we skim right past them, we start wondering what kind of a C to give from the first V.G. we encounter; and as they pile up, we decide: C- (Harvard being Harvard, one does not give D's. Consider C- a failure). Why? Not because they are a sign the student doesn't know the material, or hasn't thought carefully, or any of that folly. They simply make tedious reading. "Locke is a transitional figure." "The whole thing boils down to human rights...
Artful Equivocations are even worse; Iynx-eyed sly little rascals that we are, we see right through them. (Up to Exam No. 40. Then our lynx eyelids droop, and grading habits relax. Try to get on the bottom of the pile.) Again, it is not that A.E.'s are vicious or ludicrous as such: but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The twentieth century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad is difficult to say" (A.E.). Now one such might be droll enough...
Others are less prepared, however, "A few folks will come in here and give us a pile of papers and their W-2 forms, and ask us to fill them out," said second-year law student Samuel C. Sichko, director of the Harvard VITA program...