Word: essays
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thank you for your Essay on the frightful potential of chemical-biological weaponry [June 27] and the curious twists of logic used to justify its proliferation. Technology in ay fields races toward the day when man, wishing to zap his fellow man, can choose from an infinite arsenal of macabre techniques. While we are waiting for a weapons scientist somewhere out there to stumble upon a peaceful use for his gases and bacteria we can take heart in the words of Ogden Nash...
Many critics have tried to prove this proposition (the most famous of these is Robert Warshaw's essay "The Western" included in Dan Talbot's Film: An Anthology). Their reliance either on not calling a film a western merely because it does not fit a presupposition or on setting up as many as ten distinct types of westerns (the lone man western, the calvary western, the adult neurotic western, etc.) should be evidence in itself of the dubious quality of this theory. However, what concerns me more at this moment is the effect this idea has on filmmakers themselves...
Moreover, some critics contend, the artist's license to show and do all creates an audience of voyeurs passively feeding on their fantasies. In the visual arts, as in literature, "the cult of utterness," in one critic's phrase, tends to devalue and depersonalize human sexuality. In an essay in the book Language and Silence, an eloquent condemnation of pornography, Literary Critic George Steiner objected: "Sexual relations are, or should be, one of the citadels of privacy, the nightplace where we must be allowed to gather the splintered, harried elements of our consciousness to some kind of inviolate order...
Harry Harry Reasoner, introducing a CBS-TV Essay on Woman: "This broadcast was prepared by men, and makes no claim to being fair. Prejudice has saved us a great deal of time in preparation...
Breakaway Biafra. The essay topics are rarely hard-news musts, and never flunk the Rooney colon test. Andy says he can spot an overly sober TV treatise merely by the colon in its title; for ex ample, "Somaliland: Case History of a People," His specialty is the light TV essay that extracts the significant from the commonplace. Does it bother him that Reasoner gets all the glory and earns about $200,000 compared with his $60,000? "Harry has never actually sent me for coffee," Andy jokes, "but he often says, 'If you're going to the cafeteria...