Word: tendrils
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dialogue, for tailoring plots and characters to the design of abstract concepts, for using language as a form of showing off: "I will spare everybody a detailed discussion of all the overwriting that occurs in these stories, except to mention how distressed I am at the number of tendrils that keep showing up. I still don't even know for sure what a tendril...
This statement, coming from the author of Gravity's Rainbow, is simply not credible. If he can absorb and then brilliantly embellish the scientific progress that led up to the development of the V-2 rocket, he can look up tendril in a dictionary. And Pynchon's stories are not as bad as he claims. The Small Rain rather artfully juxtaposes the tedium of peacetime Army service, a catastrophic hurricane and sex. The Secret Integration accurately catches the locutions of an alcoholic jazz musician. Under the Rose is an evocative spy story set in a kind of operetta...
...newly identified destructive properties of ivy, one such plan has occurred to us, and we call on the University to carry it out at once. Why not uproot Harvard's ivy and transplant it (gingerly-remember the stuff dissolves cement at the touch) to walls more suited for the tendril's secretion; the Pentagon, the Yale Bowl, and the Lampoon Castle come quickly to mind. Harvard would thus keep the Houses from crumbling and at the same time comply with student's demands that the cherished ivy be saved. Who could ask for more...
...after the autumn of 1900, a young artist in Paris, was markedly better at imitating Steinlen or Toulouse-Lautrec than other Spanish artists were, but that he could run through the influences so quickly, with such nimble digestion. What he needed, he kept. He had no use for the tendril-like, decorative line of Spanish art nouveau, for instance, but he retained its liking for large, silhouetted masses, and they, grafted onto the pervasive influence of Toulouse-Lautrec, keep appearing in his Parisian cabaret scenes of 1901. Some of these are of remarkable intensity. Picasso painted Gustave Coquiot, a fashionable...