Word: stylistic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...spent last 11 years editing The Papers for the Belknap of Harvard University . "He won't put down a lot of things that you wish he would, and then he will put down a lot of things you're surprises to find. But he's a great stylist. He says things that would be commonplace if said by anyone else, but he gives them a characteristics turn that makes what he writes worthy of perpetuation...
...Swingle Singers' musical idiom is onomatopoeia, otherwise known in the trade as scat. Scat is like baby talk with a beat and is as old as singing in the shower. Rendered by a jazz stylist like Ella Fitzgerald, who reels off such breathless improvisations in Flying Home as "oodla-oodlee-ooblee-day-lay do-dee-a-din-doi-oodlay-a-din-doi-danzoit-boy-hem," scat can be a highly refined...
...much of a literary stylist, Gronow employs a direct but flat prose that captures his subjects like wasps in amber. Yet between the lines, his frigid, faultlessly attired figure dominates the book. He emerges haughty, violently prejudiced, yet worldlywise. As one contemporary wrote: "He committed the greatest of follies without in the slightest disturbing the points of his shirt collar." Can any modern memoirist make the same claim...
...corrupt critics, if it is funny at all, is heavy, testy humor. Teeth clenched, he wields the apparatus of slapstick boldly, but draws neither laughs nor blood because his northern variations on 8½ do not lend themselves to pie-in-the-face comedy. Even the most accomplished cinema stylist can scarcely hope, perhaps, to be the Fellini of the frost belt and a Scandinavian Sennett at the same time...
...effective as an actor. His obvious sincerity is an inadequate and rather embarrassing substitute for abiltiy. The quickly paced second act centers completely on Joe and allows Davis to sing nine numbers, each denoting a different stage in Joe's movement toward disaster. Happily, Davis is a great song stylist and impersonator. In each song he assumes a different pose. His delivery has a pulsating energy and clarity of effect. He yearns wistfully in a large, throaty voice for girls "with skin as white as cream." Or, as in 'Colorful," he stands smirking with his hands poised effeminately and spits...