Word: realist
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...country. Hollywood is probably right: God knows they helped make it that way, and God know there's no money to be made in innocence. The three runaways in Dreifuss's film aren't frustrated youths seeking knowledge and fulfillment, but jaded refugees from the hang-ups of social-realist films of the fifties, desperate to jump into the problems of the sixties. Similarly, the hashish-fudge that liberates Harold Fine (Peter Sellers) in Alice B. Toklas simply moves him in ten years away from a dated life-style toward the new and more-fashionable hangups of today...
When it comes to love, Cohen can be both a romantic and a realist. At times he glorifies women as succoring goddesses. In Suzanne, published in the book as a poem, a half-mad woman in rags and feathers is melded with the Christ figure to express the perfect union of body and mind...
Whyte is a realist. Accepting neither a vision of the future characterized by junky, chaotic growth nor a clean, green Utopia, he calmly predicts a much more likely middle course of high-density living, where the land is used more intensively and ingeniously than at present. He has no patience with grandiose answers. Year 2000 plans? "They vault over the messy present and near future" and justify themselves with unreliable statistical projections of past trends. As for self-contained "new towns," they start with the assumption that old cities are a lost cause-despite the fact that people continue...
...Orangerie has mounted a retrospective of his works (see color opposite), which are displayed along with those of his brother-in-law and lifelong friend, Ker-Xavier Roussel. Both were contributors to the mighty explosion that was impressionism, but their visual worlds were quite different. Vuillard was essentially a realist, a chronicler of bourgeois life. Roussel, with his nymphs and gods, was a dreamer, trying to transplant classical Greece into the French landscape...
Until the 20th century came along, few communities of a few thousand men could have lived so foul a life as did the first white men in Sydney. By Keneally's fictional talent, all is made vivid as fresh blood; the reader is spared the statistical compilations of realist fiction. Yet, we learn in the course of this cruel narrative that a sentence of death by torture (500 lashes of the cat-o'-ninetails amounted to just that) could be handed out by a kangaroo court of Marine officers as casually as a parking fine would be imposed...