Word: spencer
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...makes no sense and does no good to lament little deteriorations on every side. Constant comparisons with better old days are illusory and unreliable. It's enough to say we used to have Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and now we have Michael Douglas and Cher. If anything has been lessened at Wrigley Field, it is probably something quite small, certainly nothing to cry over, only a momentary feeling of letdown, like missing the train...
...have not yet seen it. Italian Director Franco Zeffirelli called the movie "damaging to the image of Christ. He cannot be made the object of low fantasies." Fundamentalist Leader Jerry Falwell called for a boycott against MCA, Universal's parent company; all MCA products, which include Grosset & Dunlap publishers, Spencer Gifts and Motown Records; and any theater that shows the film. Said Falwell: "Neither the label 'fiction' nor the First Amendment gives Universal the right to libel, slander and ridicule the most central figure in world history...
Elizabeth Spencer is often compared to another Mississippi-born writer, Eudora Welty. Sometimes Spencer's name is even mentioned in the same critical breath with Henry James. The comparisons are flattering, but to be measured against some of the best usually means never measuring up. Cold comfort then for Spencer, especially since so many writers today are overpraised on a narrower scale of accomplishment...
Italy, of course, is a favored setting of English and American fiction in which innocents abroad are stirred by art and sensuality. Spencer continues to use the convention effectively. The Cousins, a story in her newest collection, Jack of Diamonds, could be titled Maidenhead Revisited. Ella Mason, 50 and recently widowed, returns to Florence, where she and her hometown cousins from Martinsville, Ala., enjoyed a summer's frolic 30 years ago. One of them, Eric, now lives in Italy, and through a pleating of conversations and memories, Spencer reveals a complexity of attitudes and relationships. Not the least of them...
...Spencer's sociology and cosmopolitan tastes are not obvious. Geography, class and manners are surfaces that refract the deeper feelings and emerging awarenesses of her characters. Some are confronted with familiar situations. The young woman in the title story learns the truth about her parents' marriage after her mother dies and her father's new wife tactfully but deliberately eliminates traces of her predecessor. The plot of The Skaters is complicated and, yes, Jamesian: a disinherited son is helped by his lawyer's wife, whose lover steals the original copy of the damaging will. Spencer is dispassionate about domestic morality...