Word: quiets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...least one regularly suggsted by the other writers of that place--Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, and Ross McDonald. It thus qualifies as classically American, written with the speculative range, freedom of imagination, and fierce, clear eye that have invigorated this country's proudest works. the verse is clean, quiet, and lapidary; all the excitement is in watching McMichael take up one "unpoetic" subject after another and illuminate it; he turns all the world on the emotions of a child who is trying to find out what his father does all day and why his mother is dying...
...connection between Pasadena and the Industrial Revolution? McMichael notes that the rich of California, whom a world market brought into being, made houses out of William Morris's criticism of shabby machine production standards. Very beautiful houses, actually, and McMichael describes the principle of their construction with a wonderfully quiet (and faintly nagging) accuracy...
...would seem, the intensification of civil war in Central America, the sacrifice of the elderly and the marginally employed to provide a shield against uncertainties in the market, and the export of adulterated foodstuffs to the underdeveloped world. The detachment of Four Good Things, its precision and meditative quiet, are new especially powerful, with the power art sometimes has of stinging us awake. In the last lines of the poem, as the narrator is falling asleep his wife describes to him an afternoon spent skiing...
...crowds leave the big top for the last time, there is talk of other fairs carrying on Danbury's traditions. But the old-timers know better: they pack up their ribbons and memories with quiet resignation. Who could forget "The Great Wilno," a leather-clad stuntman who in 1929 was shot out of a cannon over the heads of startled spectators. Or the drenching downpours of 1939, or the clear, crisp days that came to be known as "Leahy's Luck." Or even Cheetah the chimp, who ate hot dogs, swilled soda and adjusted her sunglasses...
...past few decades they have soared in size. Mailer, Wolfe, even John Irving; these men are literary Paul Bunyans, their typewriters 40 axhandles from base to carriage. Unafraid of any subject, they tackle modern life head on, to either conquer (Mailer and Wolfe) or be conquered. There is nothing quiet and little reflective about these men; they sally forth and produce huge, energetic books. Ego--the vain notion that they have some idea why things are so fucked--is their motive force. These are the writers of the ! and the Capital Letters and the almost never-ending sentences, the kaboom...