Word: realist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...White House!" With his staccato delivery, Bush galvanized the delegates as he ticked off the jobs he had held, including head of the CIA, and declared, "It's time we got off the back of the CIA and the FBI." He described himself as a realist. "I see the world as it really is," he declared. "And it's tough out there...
Author John Barth, 49, began his career in the guise of a realist with a somewhat spooky sense of humor. The Floating Opera (1956) and The End of the Road (1958) appeared as slim companion pieces; they pivoted on the same philosophical question, i.e., how to impose values on a neutral universe; and both dwelt on despair as a source of grim comedy. But they were also set in a recognizable version of Maryland's Eastern Shore and populated with conventional characters. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) changed course. An encyclopedic parody of 18th century English picaresque fiction...
Castro is less optimistic about the ability of any revolution to create a "new socialist man." He is also more of a realist. Publicly he has acknowledged the difficulty involved in supplanting old attitudes, which he calls "hangovers form the capitalist value system." Even though the revolution has managed to change the foundation of society from one of competition to cooperation, stealing from the government at the expense of fellow workers persists...
...plaster molds, for instance, are the direct ancestors of Duane Hanson's ultrarealist wax people), his connections to Pop look tenuous indeed. In this changed context, it is the figures and their mood, rather than their surrounding artifacts, that one notices first; and they connect to an older realist tradition, far from the self-consciousness and media-play of Pop. They resemble, as the late Mark Rothko once said, "walk-in Hoppers," sculptural equivalents to the world of that American master, with its nocturnal bars and waiting figures. Segal's tableaux have a flavor...
Perhaps only a sophist might be tempted to tie the spread of air conditioning to the coincidentally rising divorce rate, but every attentive realist must have noticed that even a little window unit can instigate domestic tension and chronic bickering between couples composed of one who likes it on all the time and another who does not. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, not everybody likes air conditioning. The necessarily sealed rooms or buildings make some feel claustrophobic, cut off from the real world. The rush, whir and clatter of cooling units annoys others. There are even a few eccentrics who object...