Word: essay
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Your Essay "The Sad Truth About Big Spenders" [Dec. 8] gets me where it hurts. Most of us are your average Joes. We like grand gestures. Big spenders are our fantasies realized. Somewhere along the line they broke out of the mold and temporarily excelled. Now they can throw their money around. Just as we would, if we too made the big time...
...Your Essay on big spenders missed a key point. The rich of past eras-European aristocrats, Chinese emperors, American industrialists-at least in theory earned their positions by providing leadership to their societies...
...Your Essay "The Great Bicycle Wars" [Nov. 24] rang a bell with me. When I was young, I went to the Big Apple to seek my fortune. All I found was a job as a bicycle messenger in midtown Manhattan. I'm glad I returned to New Hampshire, where they don't have dangerous work like that...
...strongest and best-know essay of the lot, "Click! The Housewife's Moment of Truth," provides a primer for the housewife who has recently become aware she is oppressed. ("Decide what housework needs to be done. Then cut the list in half... Do not feel guilty.") It also lists various epiphanic moments when women realized their traditional role was absurd (at a consciousness-raising group exercise, the women discover they envision themselves as domesticated cats; a husband praises himself for helping his working wife with housework on his vacation...
There was nothing silly or pulpy about Cornell's pursuit of innocence. As Ratcliff argues in his catalogue essay, it had much more to do with the need for redemption than with any fancies about the artist-as-Alice-in-Wonderland. That need could never, by its nature, be satisfied: no guilt, no culture. Cornell was a wholly urban artist, cultivated to his fingertips, and the peace he sought was not pastoral. It was a sense of cultural tranquillity, where all images are equally artificial and equally lucid, permeable to the slightest breath of poetic association, linking memory...