Word: seem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only a modernist reading of the artist's role makes it seem contradictory that Goya was both a court artist and an inspired, tragic social critic. Efforts to see him in pop-Marxist terms as "an artist of the people" miss the point. Goya had many disillusioned moments, and by the last years of his life, when -- sick and old and bitterly disappointed by the betrayal of the liberal Spanish constitution at the hands of that squat reactionary King, Fernando VII -- he moved to France, they became a continuous pessimism. He never idealized the Spanish proletariat: it was el populacho...
...Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, the outstanding thinker of the Spanish Enlightenment, a much-exiled man who briefly held state office as the Minister of Religion and Justice under Carlos IV. Goya shows him at an ornate desk in the Madrid palace, lost in melancholy thought amid props that seem out of scale with his modesty...
...earnest plonkers had written this clumsy, lively, thoroughly entertaining family saga of war and romance, no reader would have puzzled over deep currents that seem unaccountably shallow. Anthony Burgess, however, is one of literature's certified mandarins, known as an explicator of Ulysses (Re Joyce), a postapocalyptic moralist (A Clockwork Orange), and a scholar showily at home in a double handful of ancient and modern languages. He wigwags strenuously at the outset of this new novel that primal, mythic stuff is ahead -- ancient tales threading through the dark, tribal roots of 20th century bloody-mindedness...
...Eisenhower's too: "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." But Bush's simplicity was profound, and more in keeping with his underlying message. After a negative campaign that valued victory above all, Bush's positioning himself as a moral leader may seem strange. But the new President, for one, believes that the election "was then" and that the "time to govern" should obliterate inconvenient memories...
...said, "We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on earth," the accuracy of his certitude being irrelevant to the occasion. He even looked good doing it. "I can't explain it," Barbara Bush once said, "but . . . the camera shrinks him and makes him seem small." Not last week. Perhaps it was only the trappings, but George Bush finally looked presidential...