Word: skill
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What is telling, however, is the way the Democrats seem to have papered over doctrinal disputes. Dukakis is the party's first postliberal nominee: he blends thrift, managerial skill, social tolerance and a nonbellicose foreign policy with the Democratic mantra of "Good jobs at good wages." By anointing Bentsen last week, Dukakis further complicated the game of pin-the-label-on- the-donkey. With his centrist, probusiness views, Bentsen is a preliberal, a throwback to the days of the Solid South, when Democrats were created by birth, not belief. Thus the party that ruled almost uninterrupted during the Great Liberal...
Interestingly, there does exist an animal called the giant rat of Sumatra, just as there does exist a beast called racism. Those facts (that the creatures actually exist) have nothing to do, however, with the art of telling horror stories and lies. That skill has its earliest development in the imagination of children, standing in front of angry parents and frantically inventing alibis. Sometimes children are brilliant...
...think of Hockney is to think of pictorial skill and a total indifference (in the work, at least) to the dark side of human experience. Does the latter make him a less serious painter? Of course not, any more than it trivialized the work of that still underrated artist Raoul Dufy. At root, Hockney is popular because his work offers a window through which one's eye moves without strain or fuss into a wholly consistent world. That world has its cast of recurrent characters -- friends, lovers and family. Hockney's portraits of his parents, in particular, are full...
...could begrudge David Hockney his success when, as his retrospective shows, he creates a consistent world with such skill...
Listen to what Wolfe himself writes about that heady time, when clever skill was the writer's champagne. A writer could break all rules, make up words that had never been heard before and get away with it--yes, even get praised for it! Take grammar and fly in the face of tradition. Everything's new in society, but this stuff, this journalism, this is New. Then, The Novel was receding into the novel, and journalism was becoming New Journalism...