Word: rueful
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...certainly is. At one point he suggests putting a small bottle of oil to the ear, the better to hear the ancient waters. At another he intones, "You can't find oil if you are not honest; I'm not sure I know how to explain this." The rueful part, after the semicolon, redeems the rest. He natters on about his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hughes, whose mild, pleasant drawings accompany the text. Is he happy with her? Without her? Will they marry? One wonders whether, as a suitor, he will ever top an early gambit, when he invited...
...most eagerly anticipated arrival, Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love, is also the best. Adapted from a 1955 novel by Britain's David Garnett, it is a rueful and autumnal meditation on romance as a process of teaching, almost of parenting. Five characters of widely varying ages entwine, sort themselves out and entwine in new pairings over decades. This sophisticated material is handled with cunning naivete. Lloyd Webber's score, characteristically, consists mostly of a few much repeated tunes: Love Changes Everything, Seeing Is Believing and Life Goes On, Love Goes Free. All three rank among the prettiest...
...face -- no obligations at all, really -- how is a bright, sensitive, well-off young fellow to grow up? Honoring tradition, Alec Stern decides to go abroad to try out maturity. His destination: Tokyo. Bicycle Days, a first novel by a 24-year-old Harvard graduate, is the wry, rueful story of Alec's efforts to cope with his job at a computer outfit and with a vexing foreign culture. Through his adoptive family, the friendship of an old fisherman and a troubling affair with an older woman, he succeeds in learning some humbling lessons. Of course that means turning west...
Between the global troubles, the President spent time with Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget. "I've been talking about 1991," he said with a rueful smile, "and I don't like a thing I've heard so far." For the moment Mikhail Gorbachev, the wily Slav, and General Manuel Noriega, the Latin scoundrel, hold the spotlight, but Bush knows that in the long run, the monstrous, suffocating federal budget may be his biggest threat...
Most Western experts, along with rueful Soviets, blame the country's industrial ministries for stifling initiative and innovation. "I used to have to go to the ministry with the smallest change in our work," says Boris Fomin, director of the Elektrosila plant. "They issued hundreds of instructions, which usually contradicted one another. There was no strategic guidance." While Gorbachev's industrial reform required enterprises to wean themselves from government subsidies by January 1989, the majority of Soviet factories still rely on Moscow for merchandise orders, supplies and financial support...