Word: prose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rock culture. Readers accustomed to spending their weekends with articles like "Brazil: Colossus of the South" were suddenly snapping awake to such Wolfean fare as "Oh, Rotten Gotham -Sliding Down Into the Behavioral Sink," "Natalie Wood and the Shockkkkkk of Recognition" and "Muvva Earth and Codpiece Pants." The prose itself rollicked with words like "lollygagging" and "infarcted," embedded in pages that were covered with a confetti of punctuation marks...
PERHAPS IT IS this hesitancy to generalize, to offer weighty and solemn judgements, that makes Didion's writing so evocative. Instead of pronouncements, she offers reportage. She focuses on an incident and notes every detail in uncluttered, harsh prose. Didion also has the reporter's curiosity about how things work. She investigates how orchids are tended, how freeways are monitored, how lifeguards live, how dams work, the philosophy and history of shopping malls. She is always honest in her examinations of a setting or person. She dams through accuracy, not forceful moral argument. In "Bureaucrats," for example, she perfectly captures...
This centerfold prose disfigures the novel and makes a few paragraphs indistinguishable from Harold Robbins at the gallop: "When she arrived, the flare of her seductive allure would be in full glow, the meld of her sexuality fired by the challenge of another woman." Fortunately, Kosinski's kinks are a minor portion of Passion Play. The reader who can get past horse-and-lady scenes that bear no relation to International Velvet will be rewarded with passages of great force...
...them. For his complicitly, Armbrister got raked over the coals when the cash came rolling in: Jerry gave him a taste of Republican austerity. Armbrister deserved it. He captured the full vapidity of Ford's colloquial style--an historical achievement, but a narrative catastrophe. Ford's boring, flat, humorless prose drones on endlessly, like the Great Plains that spawned...
...Core report instructs professors that their Core courses should not just present a set of facts but must provide a "basic literacy in major forms of intellectual discourse." Tatar says she prefers to avoid such inflated prose and is unsure how such notions apply to the humanities, or for that matter what intellectual discourse even means. But she believes she may have unintentionally conformed to the report's exhortation by "familiarizing students with two methodologies: historical and literary." Tatar shrugs. "I always thought the point of education in general was to teach people to think critically. If you want...