Word: smile
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...academic settings than in his conscientiously worked-up factory scenes, and naturally so. He taught literature at the University of Birmingham from 1960 to 1987, and still holds an honorary chair there. But in either sphere his writing displays the wicked eye of a born satirist. Swallow's smile exposes teeth set at odd angles, "like tombstones in a neglected churchyard." A receptionist at Vic's factory strokes her platinum-blond hairdo "as if it were an ailing pet." This is a novel that lives up to its own billing: it's nice work...
...back from Lubbock/ I saw Jesus on the plane/ . . . or maybe it was Elvis/ You know, they kinda look the same"), and a memorably nasty cameo portrait of Ronald Reagan as a cowboy named Jingo in Little Tin God. That's vintage Henley, delivered with a snarl and a smile, but The Heart of the Matter, which ends the record, is the struggle for a different sense of place, another state of grace: "I've been tryin' to get down to the heart of the matter/ Because the flesh will get weak and the ashes will scatter...
...make you wait for six hours with 500 other passengers in an area which was once a restroom. We'll sit the plane on the runway for three hours and tell you repeatedly that takeoff will be `in five minutes.' We'll smile and give you a dish labelled `chicken' which will really turn out to be rotting meat...
Without the constitutional prohibition against a third term, might he have run again? Reagan, in his first full interview since leaving the White House, gave that slow, easy smile, ducked his head in a kind of protest against such audacity. "I cannot answer that, really," he said. "With ((the 22nd Amendment)) in place, you did not even think of it. You knew that it was all over at the end of two terms." Hunch: he sure would have...
...Well -- older, anyway," she says with a smile, pressing cordobas on him as he swishes greasy water over the simple concrete marker...