Word: macdonaldization
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FLASHMAN AND THE DRAGON, George MacDonald Fraser THE GARDEN OF EDEN, Ernest Hemingway THE INHUMAN CONDITION, Clive Barker THE LAST BLOSSOM ON THE PLUM TREE, Brooke Astor MONKEYS, Susan Minot "Q" CLEARANCE, Peter Benchley...
...foot-dangling." Currently, Parker's Spenser sings the best sassy blues: "Ideal options aren't something I have much to do with. Most of the time I'm shuttling between bad and worse." Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer prefers stride (when he's not playing chopsticks), and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee fuses bebop and rap: "Go get the lady with the unusual haircut and add her to the stack. Go get Meyer and the boat and bring the boat around. Use the big anchor and the power takeoff winch to pull the Flush out of the mangroves. Cork...
...rise of organized crime during Prohibition, the disillusionment of the Depression, all paralleled the development of the gallant equalizer. Today he is likely to deal with government corruption, financial fraud and environmental threats. "I don't consider my newest book, Barrier Island, as hard-boiled fiction," says John D. MacDonald. "It's about a land scam in islands off the Mississippi coast." The detective story is one of the few fiction forms that deal directly with the seamier side of American life. To improvise on Mencken, himself an American institution no less secure than the one he launched with Black...
...Holiday songs, Krazy Kat, Preston Sturges movies, Ernie Kovacs, the Four Tops, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Dylan, E.T., even blue jeans, Whoppers and soda pop. But ask again, on a dull, gray, Spenglerian day, and the view is altogether different. Alarming, appalling, totally awesome. The critic Dwight Macdonald called pop culture a spreading ooze back in the 1950s, when Sylvester Stallone was still just a boy. Today America's righteous pop thug is huge, ubiquitous, swaggering from one medium into the next and the next: he is a movie warrior, he is a TV cartoon character...
That great leveling effect, however, has not made pop any more palatable to old-line intellectuals. The contempt was, until rather recently, obligatory and absolute. Mandarin ill will reached a peak in "Masscult & Midcult," Dwight Macdonald's acutely cranky 1960 essay. "Masscult is bad in a new way," he wrote, because "it doesn't even have the theoretical possibility of being good." A pernicious "Gresham's law" was inevitable: good art would be driven out by the bad -- by pop. Another ferocious holdout is William Gass, a very intelligent critic whose opaque, self-conscious novels are the sort of fiction...