Word: dampness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...bring lots of underwear; you'll save some money. Why? Because the secret to a laundry-free year is oodles of undies. Maybe you'll never have to see a damp basement laundry room in Hurlbut or Weld. If you're clean on the inside, who cares about the outside...
...actress who can take us from the relaxed romantic clarity of her songs (she sings all the vocals herself) to the damp miseries of Limbo's melodramatic (and harshly ambiguous) conclusion without our being aware of the downshifting. But then, for much of this decade, Mastrantonio has been a performer in search of a defining role. Or maybe not sufficiently in search of one--at least not with the teeth-gritted ferocity of her peers...
...Midsummer Night's Dream, and sure enough, that's what happens in Michael Hoffman's adaptation, which oxymoronically manages to seem both leaden and hasty. Reset for no discernible reason from ancient Athens to 19th century Tuscany, it focuses on the fun stuff--the fairies who inhabit the damp but enchanted wood, the rude mechanicals (led by Kevin Kline's hammy but well-cured Bottom) and their awful-wonderful production of Pyramus and Thisbe...
John Hollander does not move me. His poems are not verses that romance-filled 16-year-olds also reading The Bell Jar will dog-ear and gloss with pink pens. No "how-do-I-love-thees" cling to Hollander's pages like damp, juvenile kisses. Hollander's newest book of poetry, Figurehead, insulted my delicate romantic sensibilities at first with its apparent lack of poeticized emotion and what seemed overly intellectual, self-conscious and anal attention to grandiose metrical dexterity, complete with a hyper-inflated vocabulary that rivals Webster...
...interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. --Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species...