Word: bleakly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that picture lay in its relocation of that classic device of the horror genre, the haunted house. Instead of being a Gothic pile isolated on a bleak moor, it was a spaceship visiting an unwelcoming planet in an obscure corner of the universe. But the situation was the immemorial one: a monster, in this case an alien life-form requiring human hosts for gestation, is stalking the spaceship's endless, ill-lighted corridors, picking off victims one by one. But there was only one creature, six frightened earthlings and little more subtext (or, for that matter, dialogue) to the film...
City dwellers think of nature "as a garden, or a view framed by a window," he writes, but peasants and sailors know better. "Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise . . . fearsomely indifferent . . . It is within this bleak natural context that beauty is encountered, and the encounter is by its nature sudden and unpredictable . . . This is why it moves us." After arguing that "art is always a form of prayer," Berger closes with a quick touch of irony: "The white wooden bird is wafted by the warm air rising from the stove in the kitchen where...
...resignation, the Arab oil embargo, the Iranian hostage crisis. Jimmy Carter was apparently overwhelmed by the presidency. The Club of Rome's Spenglerian predictions about the earth's shrinking resources shadowed the '70s, and Carter at last announced that there was a malaise in the land. The drift was bleak: things would get worse and worse and never get better again. Reagan's immediate predecessors were smudged by a darkness of failure and were all unhorsed by events they lost control of. Reagan's psychic weather is bright sunshine, and so far he has managed to keep the world from...
...great Fourth of July birthday party will not dwell on the ugly side of American freedom (the founders reserving freedom pretty much for white male property owners and countenancing the enslavement of blacks, for example). Nor will the star-burst rhetoric discuss the heartlessness of much American freedom, the bleak lives of those who cannot compete. Freedom has a lot of Charles Darwin's logic prowling around in it, hungry for the weaker animals. Says Economist William H. Branson: "What we've seen since 1981 is the difficulty people have if they lose. They shoot themselves. I was talking...
Some of his entries are speculative: Ophelia may have been the Katharine Hamlet who drowned in the Avon river in 1579. But other cases are beyond argument. Harold Skimpole, the "damaged young man . . . who had undergone some unique process of depreciation" in Bleak House, was the poet Leigh Hunt. A boasting letter from Charles Dickens is exhibit A: "The likeness is astonishing. I don't think it could be more like (Hunt) himself." Dickens tempered his Victorian portrait with humor, but George Eliot was made of sterner stuff. Apologizing to a clergyman who had recognized an unflattering likeness in Scenes...