Word: gossip
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Truth & Truisms. The chief pleasure of Ben Franklin during these years was journalism, and it is Franklin the journalist who dominates this book. There are the Addisonian "Silence Dogood" letters with their gently satiric barbs at Harvard College, bits of local gossip, humorous anecdotes, and a masterful and intricate essay on the value of a paper currency. In the profoundest sense, Franklin began a lifelong dialogue with his fellow Americans on their democratic destiny ("In those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own"). But entertainment always...
...ominous thrum of bongo drums in her ear, while the natives chomp raw fish for an appetizer. Author Eliot confides that eventually Ella got a divorce, but otherwise she leaves this and many another story in just the tantalizingly scrappy shape she found it in family memoirs or the gossip sheets of the gilded age. Either because of fellow feeling (she is herself the child of an Anglo-American match and bears the title of Lady Elizabeth Kinnaird) or sheer absentmindedness, Author Eliot keeps drifting away from her subject-how a parcel of status-seeking mammas, nouveau riche papas, dutiful...
...half months after Gene had begun his idyll, there was a Faculty meeting. When the discussion became dull, four professors who were sitting next to each other started to gossip. Each of them, it turned out, had Gene Robertson in his class, and knew of Gene's defection. "Let's visit him," one said. "When the boy meets us in person, he will see the light." "Knowledge is a wonderful thing," they told each other incidentally, "and we will (and have and shall for evermore) tell him what is important...
...even in life itself, who has been brought in off the street to make a quorum for morning prayers. Except for an aged rabbi, even the elderly Jews who show up largely lack faith; they come out of habit or boredom, or as to a club where they can gossip and wisecrack and argue various isms. One of them brings his 18-year-old granddaughter, a schizophrenic who has been in and out of asylums and who, he thinks, is possessed of a dybbuk or evil spirit that must be exorcised. Amid prayer and prattle, amid the girl...
...camera marks the most important advance in the technology of eavesdropping since the invention of the keyhole. The prying eye can now record what it sees, and gossip has become a visual as well as a verbal art. This is vividly apparent in Observations, a sort of peeping tome in which Photographer Richard Avedon's pictures are discussed by Author Truman Capote. Unfortunately, Capote writes in a style that combines the worst features of Henry James, Dorothy Kilgallen, and deb talk (says he of Marilyn Monroe: "Just a slob really: an untidy divinity-in the sense that a banana...