Word: vivid
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...same, American culture moves so readily to legitimize the latest enthusiasms of mass taste--snowboarding! game shows! Irish step dancing!--that it always seems in danger of overwhelming art that demands quieter attention. The devilishly effective machinery of American pop culture turns our attention constantly to whatever is loud, vivid, swaggering...
...great art is born all the time out of what is loud, vivid and swaggering, or even conventional and sentimental--in short, out of the primordial ooze of low culture. Consider the modern novel. In the hands of a master like Philip Roth, it can register the smallest vibrations of the interior life or the broadest convulsions of the wider world. But when it emerged as an art form in the 18th century--springing from a flux of cheap pamphlets, folktales, adventurers' memoirs and religious allegories--it was widely despised as philistine trash, a plaything for an undiscriminating middle class...
...Their names teem with a sort of secret Shakespearean life. I browse through field guides to wildflowers and weeds, and when I read them, I feel as if I have rediscovered a rich, hidden vein of the English language-a parallel universe populated by such vivid protagonists as Carrion Flower and Wild Bleeding Heart, as Vipers Bugloss and Crazyweed, as Hog Peanut, Corn Cockle, Tansy leaf Aster, Showy Orchis, Death Camas, and that damned elusive Scarlet Pimpernel...
...there is something difficult to grasp about Blake: an obsessive personal mythology that is intensely vivid and yet hard to see as a whole. As he put it, he had to devise his own system or be enslaved by another's. Its roots are Puritan, dissenting, millenarian--and very English; Blake never traveled abroad. But English antiquity and especially English medievalism mattered enormously to him. They were the meat and milk of his imagination. Even if we didn't know that James Basire, the engraver to whom his father apprenticed him, had sent him to study and draw the monuments...
...most vivid evidence of her quickening maturity rests in her singing. If you heard her a year ago, then four months ago, and then this week, you might find it hard to believe it's all one performer. In her live appearances, Monheit has moved from visible self-consciousness to something close to comfortable; on her recordings, she's crossing into territory she never could have traversed successfully only months ago. Saxophonist Brecker, a seven-time Grammy winner, says, "From the moment I walked into the studio and heard her sing, I sensed I was in the presence...