Word: dank
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Dank dungeons, gothic ruins and rainswept mountain peaks are fine for inducing the creeps. But when it comes to high-grade macabre, there's no place like home. Take the London house furnished by British Author Ian McEwan, 29, in this tight, unsettling first novel. The place stands almost deserted amid urban rubble, one of the few survivors of a highway plan that went nowhere. In it live Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom, a reasonably normal array of siblings ranging in age from 17 to six, and their mother, who is dying. The earlier death of the father...
EMBALMED IN DUSTY, dank libraries, the social mind now holds an enormous cache of scholarship on political leaders--presidents, tyrants, revolutionaries--and followers--the rabble, the masses, the voting public. Historians endlessly debate the role of the great man, the masses and of fate in the unfolding of history. And usually the advocate defends one of these forces as the prime mover in history, or throws up his hands, frustrated by the epic proportions of the conflict...
...that she chose some other manner to do so. Gornick believes that these people became Communists simply because they "cared more." They cared about the people in the mills and the mines, about the migrant workers, about the immigrants who sought a bright new life and found only a dank tenement. But instead of stressing the moral or political outrage that fed their "caring," she harps on their emotional needs. Human beings, she tells us in a remarkable burst of insight, need to find meaning in life. Moreover, she reveals, people need to overcome feelings of isolation. The Party...
...rampage through the tired symbols of American cultural bankruptcy--Easy-Off, Mopeds, McDonald's hamburgers, pre-meds--they suddenly realize that they can do it without the formula. They can do it all with mirrors, through an intriguing process called "joke-cloning." They assemble in the dank, tomb-like basement of Harvard's newly-egalitarian Hasty Pudding Club, and, armed only with a dog-eared copy of "Boy's Life" and two pirated video-cassettes of outlawed Johnny Carson monologues, set to work. Reviving a centuries-old tradition, they begin plucking young, impressionable lads from off the street and from...
...pain, but that is not to be confused with anguish. Anguish is what has obsessed many of our best-known "confessional poets," including Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. They also expressed some joys, but in the end depression always tipped the balance. Lowell fought the dank beast throughout his life. Berryman, Plath and Sexton took their own lives when, as Rilke wrote in "The Song of the Suicide," the world's profusion entered the head rather than the bloodstream...