Word: descends
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Thrones and Colossi. To move from the grand volumes and rhythmical, steely incision of these Tlingit house posts and Eskimo masks into the world of American neoclassical sculpture is to shift to provincialism. It is also to descend from necessity into sentiment, and, in a sense, from confidence into anxiety. Compared with the pressure of ritual meaning in the best Indian art, the search for a language of classical form and Roman gravitas conducted by the professionals who rose to commemorate the American ideal after the Revolution-Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers and Thomas Crawford-looks curiously wistful. Hiram Powers...
...semi-meaningless maxims (of Rubin, "He is Jimmy Connors deciding to be Chrissie Evert, as solemn as an oil rig;" of Canada, "a New Zealand on rubber wheels." Leonard must have some idea what these things mean). It also sometimes produces really good and perceptive lines (writers "will descend into pulpdom, where the libidinal cathexes are so simpleminded it seems that anyone with a grudge against women has a chance to make money.") Maybe Leonard has watched too much TV, or thinks too much about beefing up his chapter in Familiar Quotations, but at least he's in there plugging...
American Electric Power, a big utility holding company that also owns coal mines, has built tremendous smokestacks that tower 1,000 ft. over some of its power plants. When noxious sulfur dioxides are discharged at that altitude, the gases become so mixed with clean air that after they finally descend to the level at which people breathe, the sulfur is too diluted to be harmful. Sulfur can also be removed from coal smoke by special chemical catalysts called "scrubbers" before the smoke goes up the stack. Trouble is, the scrubbers are expensive-the Tennessee Valley Authority is spending $50 million...
...world map magically moved away from you. Just 20 min. after Venice, the heel of the Italian boot had been reached. Moments later, Greece flashed by on the left, and soon Crete and Cyprus were behind us, too. The yellow-brown dusk of the desert began to descend as Captain Norman Todd of British Airways throttled back and glided toward Bahrain, a 231-sq.-mi. island of oil rigs, a refinery and an aluminum smelter; it is a key stopover on the air route to Australia...
...houses of gold, jewelry, furniture and other artifacts thought to be needed in the afterlife. The poor, who could scarcely get through their present life, took a skeptical view of such hoarding and helped themselves. The security of buried pharaohs became a macabre contest. As grave robbers prepared to descend on a site, loyal priests who had set guards on the mummies would rush the embalmed bodies to secret hiding places, one step ahead of the thieves...