Word: spaded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...individual stands. The term rugged individualism was coined by Herbert Hoover only a decade before the onset of Big Government and of a war where victory depended on America's sense of belonging to the world. Behold two rugged individuals of popular culture, the Lone Ranger and Sam Spade, helping the weak and troubled, and keeping communities stable and intact by enforcing the law. How rugged...
Travel plans are made on both coasts and down in the Deep South. A book, Malcolm Cowley's The View from 80, prefatory spade work, makes its way by post between these points. "The new octogenarian feels as strong as ever when he is sitting back in a comfortable chair," the author observed. "In a moment he will rise and go for a ramble in the woods, taking a gun along, or a fishing rod, if it is spring. Then he creaks to his feet, bending forward to keep his balance, and realizes he will do nothing...
...increase geometrically with every poem, starting back in 1966 with the appearance of his first true verse, "Digging." It announced, as William Butler Yeats announced in one of his own early works, that a vocation was being sought: "Living roots awaken in my head./ But I've no spade to follow.../ Between my finger and my thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I'll dig with...
...virtue of calling a spade a spade is that when it is traded in, accountants can still make sense of the books. The virtue of calling political values by their real names is that when social policy is to be made, citizens can make sense of the choices. That used to be the case in the debate about pornography. If Minneapolis is any indication of where that debate is heading, it will not be the case for long...
...esque parodies. Ford, a natural descendent of Chandler's tough but tender-hearted heroes, runs into more than one beautiful killer between shoot-outs. In Blade Runner, however, the ladies' stone-cold hearts are usually a symptom of automation, which takes the edge off the romance. The monotone Sam Spade narration also becomes ridiculous and does little to characterize a hero who relies on frequent drunken debauches to reveal his emotional depth. The poor guy is clearly troubled, but the theatrical shorthand of empty, albeit exotic, liquor bottles and frequent comments about how lousy it is to be a killer...