Word: puritans
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...pick and quote wherever they choose: he does not suffer from the snobbery of influence. "The sublime of Orange Crate art," critic Adam Gopnik writes in his catalog introduction, and one knows just what he means. Thiebaud is one of the few American artists whose ambitions have no Puritan or didactic dimension--he wants to give pleasure but in a serious and considered way, and he does...
...star-studded array of folks with whom he shared them. The second, "Now Dig This: the Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern," is an anthology of previously uncollected writings and interviews that appeared in a range of publications, from the "quality-lit" (Southern's phrase) mag "the Paris Review" to "Puritan" (the adult publication that was so explicit it was sold shrink-wrapped). Both books fill a significant void, offering evidence that Southern remained a potent, wildly creative scribe during his last 25 years on this planet. His skill in career-planning never matched his consummate wit and imagination (in fact...
...there is something difficult to grasp about Blake: an obsessive personal mythology that is intensely vivid and yet hard to see as a whole. As he put it, he had to devise his own system or be enslaved by another's. Its roots are Puritan, dissenting, millenarian--and very English; Blake never traveled abroad. But English antiquity and especially English medievalism mattered enormously to him. They were the meat and milk of his imagination. Even if we didn't know that James Basire, the engraver to whom his father apprenticed him, had sent him to study and draw the monuments...
...this recreational multitasking is not only a technical change but an assault on the very couch-potato philosophy of leisure, which I hereby dub chaise-pomme-de-terrisme. In today's productivity-minded, techno-Puritan culture, you are a sloth and a loser if you aren't doing at least two things at all times: making a cell-phone call while checking messages on your Blackberry, checking stock quotes while making love to your partner, and so on. It's strange to think of watching the tube as a throwback to a simpler, more contemplative day, but that's what...
...those who gathered in Philadelphia in 1776, Adams was one of the first to advocate independence. The following year, he was sent as an envoy to Paris, where he worked with Benjamin Franklin and later Thomas Jefferson. They were both more polished and popular than Adams--and certainly less Puritan in their approach to the pleasures of Paris. After the war Adams became America's first ambassador to England, where he again proved stiffly reliable but devoid of the courtiers' charms that counted for so much in the world of European diplomacy...