Word: self
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Central to the book's appeal is the compelling voice of its main character, Renée Michel, a 54-year-old Paris apartment-building concierge who struggles to hide her self-taught erudition and cultivation from snobby, rich tenants. She disdains their élitist notions of class and social order, but she knows the residents would be outraged at discovering what a deep grasp the hired help has of art and learning. So Renée masks her intellect behind the persona expected of her lowly station...
...painter and a movie critic, Manny, who died at 91 last week, was the enemy of the ornate, the long-winded, the self-important. His collages asserted the artistic value of small things in boxes; his writing championed the cramped brilliance of little men in tight spots - in the B movies he loved and, through his writing, helped raise from forgotten to fashionable, from gargoyles to saints. At the same time he sniped at critics' darlings like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. (Citizen Kane was "exciting but hammy.") Above all, he urged the moviegoer's attention away from plot...
...wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago..." What he wanted was obsession within anonymity: termite art, operating under the floorboards of official culture, doing it in the dark, "where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes...
...personality; "I made it a point never to use the word I in an essay, an article," he told Ollman. Though hardly a hermit, he avoided the community of critics and the proximity of the people he wrote about. "Anonymity and coolness... writing film-centered criticism rather than self-centered criticism," was one of the seven "Critical Precepts" that he and Patricia Patterson - Manny's intimate collaborator in his writing, arting and, for 40 years, life - laid down in Film Comment in 1977. "With few exceptions, we don't like meeting the movie director or going to press screenings...
...speech to tackle corruption and provide food. Political analyst Fred Musayengana dismissed the address as lacking substance. "There is really nothing to talk about in the President's speech," he says. "It is hollow. It does not address fundamental issues like employment, increased production and how Zimbabwe might become self-sufficient." With reporting by correspondents inside Zimbabwe