Word: benignity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...horrors of World War II. Neo-fascist skinheads savage Bernard when he visits Berlin to see the Wall come down. The novel addresses the depths of hatred and spite to which the world often descends. On a personal scale, the narrator himself is both protected by a benign intuition, which saves him from a scorpion's bite, and seized by loathing so intense that he quietly breaks a stranger's nose. In just such an unassuming manner, McEwan questions the forces that govern our lives. Can we really explain the twisted landscape of human history with the neat, scientific principles...
...skeptics doubt there can be any benign intervention, at least one that is also effective. Some supplies dropped at night from that high are going to fall outside target areas. Analysts are worried that Serbs may use the air drops as an excuse for again blockading truck convoys that lately have been getting through to some besieged towns in eastern Bosnia. Worst of all, there is a widespread fear that the U.S. will be pulled into deeper involvement in the Bosnian bloodbath. Serbs, or Muslims eager for American intervention, might shoot down a cargo plane, triggering a military response...
Rothenberg's huge-scale images are powerful and benign...
...pulling them together in one piercing image of near hieroglyphic force. A recent example is Blue U-Turn, 1989: an androgynous body, huge in scale and bent into an inverted arch, vibrant with sparkles and detonations of cobalt and ultramarine, swimming in deep marine space. It seems powerful and benign, dispelling the angst of her earlier work. It transcends Expressionism. Only a major talent could have produced...
...things, however, seem unique in Lam's work. One is its pervasive, melancholy tone of dreamy eroticism, metamorphosed into "presences" that would seem monstrous if they weren't essentially benign -- horse-headed women, birdlike deities, masks conflated with breasts but equipped with phallic chins. The second is the persistence of religious motifs that no European artist was likely to grasp but that were of deep significance to Lam -- the symbols of Santeria ceremonies. Why do Lam's women have heads like horses? Not, fundamentally, because of Picasso and Guernica but because in Santeria ceremonies the medium is known...