Word: prose
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most severe of these is Donaldson's prose style. Before his death in 1982 Cheever had regaled many interviewers and companions with tales of his past. The litany took on anecdotal grandeur: his glamorous New England ancestors, his childhood in Quincy, Mass., as the second son of a failed father and domineering mother, his expulsion from Thayer Academy, his struggles to make his name as a writer during the 1930s, and his growing < recognition as a regular contributor of short stories to The New Yorker; then marriage and three children -- Susan, Ben, Federico -- and the move to the exurbs north...
...does find something for her candied prose to cloy on. "He stirred in me all the emotions present in an intimate relationship," pants Huffington, who never met Picasso. "I was seduced by his magnetism, his intensity, that mysterious quality of inexhaustibility bursting forth from the transfixing stare of his black-marble eyes as much as from his work . . . Picasso was for the women and for many of the men in his life both the irresistibly sensual and seductive Don Juan and the divine Krishna." Add Dallas to Callas, and presto: Phallus...
Huffington even comes up with a gay period for Picasso. In 1898, she claims, during a visit to the mountains near Horta, he fell in love with an unnamed gypsy boy. The high-sierra idyll is padded with imagined dialogue and trills of swoony prose, but not one scrap of solid evidence is given...
...first proprieties of the Victorian age, the age of the corset, that the modernists threw off: the sexual revolution might be said to have begun when Joyce's Molly Bloom spilled out all her private thoughts in 36 pages of unbridled, almost unperioded and officially censored prose; and another rebellion was surely marked when E.E. Cummings first felt free to commit "God" to the lower case...
...marks ("Caramba! Quien sabe?"), while the impassive Chinese traditionally added to his so-called inscrutability by omitting directions from his ideograms. The anarchy and commotion of the '60s were given voice in the exploding exclamation marks, riotous capital letters and Day-Glo italics of Tom Wolfe's spray-paint prose; and in Communist societies, where the State is absolute, the dignity -- and divinity -- of capital letters is reserved for Ministries, Sub-Committees and Secretariats...