Word: prose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tourney's regulations stipulate there will be three "High Commissioners of Galactic Action" whose decisions will be final; the "Commissar of communication and general Ivy League Profundity," Tim Clifford; the "Commissar of Propulsion and Meandering Sophomoric Prose," Burke St. John; and the "Commissar of Questionable creativity", none other than Aulet...
...doesn't give a fig for the shipyard. "I don't care about the money at all. I have put that shipyard up my nose ten times over." In cocaine, of course--Chet is what Raymond Chandler used to call a cokey, and Panama's prose comes to you through the paranoid fog of a rolled Benjamin Franklin...
...STRANGE little book, greatly flawed but tantalizingly good-groups of brilliant paragraphs sandwiched around prose that runs annoyingly flat. Tom McGuane jumped the stakes on himself; the epigram that begins the book is "The best epitaph a man can gain is to have accomplished daring deeds of valor against the enmity of fiends during his lifetime." Worthy sentiments, but that hardly makes the comic Nylon Pindar a fiend. More a shitsucker, in Chet's phrase, more Runyonesque. The Caribbean syndicalist novel is not an art form of the future; after all, Hero's engine never really ran anything; it just...
...Shaw sang a chant of social significance; the tales are filled with laborers and struggling families indistinguishable from Clifford Odets or Arthur Miller characters. But by the '40s he had found his own voice, a Shavian mix of irony and poignance. Since then the supple prose has been, like Cheever's, dominated by sexual themes and by the attempt to lend common experiences and ordinary people a secular grace...
...playing around with dramatic from: the characters in his plays see themselves as figuratively or literally on a stage. Fassbinder displays a similar interest in form, and a feeling for intricate vision detail to match Stoppard's verbal relish. Match this pair with Nabokov, with his witty, self-conscious prose and playful pokes at literary form and point-of-view, and you have a threesome so finely tuned that they practically exclude the rest of us. Add Dirk Bogarde, one of Britain's most mannered, fastidious actors, and it's no surprise Despair is impenetrable...