Word: staled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...when ic succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Soviet Union's Communist Party last November. Almost immediately, a gaggle of professional and amateur Kremlinologists scrambled to fill the information gap. Thus far all but one of their books have been either disappointingly speculative or based on stale data. The exception is this lively and provocative portrait by Zhores Medvedev, an exiled Soviet scientist living in London. Medvedev, 57, relied in part on the scholarly skills and resources of his twin brother, Roy Medvedev, who has remained in Moscow and is the author of Let History Judge...
...proclaimed just one week before Black Thursday, the stock-market crash of 1929. (Its founder, Henry R. Luce, decided to go ahead anyway after learning from the experts that "this slump may last as long as one year.") Luce wanted a magazine of business that would go beyond "the stale Get-Rich Maxims of onetime errand boys." He knew that businessmen got as "kittenish as a Victorian subdeb" when caught in the public eye but was not prepared for how hesitant corporations were to open their doors. In those days, stockholders were entitled to little information, the public to even...
...suicide. To some extent, all writing draws on autobiography, but in no other major writer is the distance from experience to fiction so short. For Kafka, all fantasy is rooted in the personal and the everyday: the miserable home, the suffocating office, the unconsummated affair and, below all, the stale gingerbread city of Prague. Here he was three times an outsider: a solitary, a Jew and a writer in German rather than Czech...
Those achievements would gratify most theater people. Miller, however, looks back and pronounces his existence weary, stale, flat and, above all, unprofitable. He says he is "tired of traveling, traveling, traveling, just to make a living." He waves off the idea of settling in to run a large resident theater: "If I had the worries that Trevor Nunn does at the Royal Shakespeare Company, I would absolutely open my veins in the bath." He resents the very existence of critics: "Twenty years of being reconstituted in newsprint has worn me out." With extravagantly pouty self-mockery, he sums...
...McBride and Carson, whose major previous credit is the undercult classic David Holtzman's Diary, approached the problem of remaking Breathless, updating it and resetting it in Los Angeles, the center of everything Godard was subverting. Indeed the movie never entirely shakes off its self-consciousness. But the stale, cynical air that attends most remakes is absent here. Carson knows how to write out of the side of his mouth, and McBride knows how to stage both action and eroticism; their work has a drive and energy that derive from conviction and, perhaps, good old American know-how. Best...