Word: dimness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...unrealistic in this country. In an individualistic, free-market society like ours, where most of one's energies are devoted to personal advancement or economic survival, there is very little room for the exercise of civic virtue, especially among the economically disadvantaged, and a general cultivation of citizenship has dim prospects. Our nation is instead plagued by voter apathy, widespread self-centredness, and alienation from a distant and bureaucratic federal government. In this atmosphere, a few voluntary exercises in civic virtue would do little to change general attitudes. The time and opportunity costs that such voluntary activities often involve...
...therefore understandable why the lead actor from Richard's Cork Leg lurks outside the theater trying to cajole us into remaining seated through the agonizing performance of Play. Charles Puckette sits and smokes his cigarette, then as the lights dim he sings a song and invites us to sit awhile before he comes on. The fact that he commits numerous theatric no-no's, like talking to the other performers as they wait in the pit, is easily overlooked by the needed hints that he provides of things to come...
Anita Brookner's smartly written novels sell briskly in England, where the author lectures on neoclassicism and the Romantic movement at London's Courtauld Institute. She is definitely not a romantic. Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac (1984 winner of Britain's Booker Prize) take dim views of grand passion. Says the heroine of Hotel du Lac, a successful author of romances, "The facts of life are much too terrible to go into my kind of fiction." The narrator of Look at Me takes this sentiment to the extreme: "It is wiser, in every circumstance, to forget...
There have been setbacks. Words and images on the oversize computer screens installed in the lecture halls were too dim to be seen with room lights on. When the lights were lowered, students could not take notes. Some of the more elaborate simulations created for physics and statistics proved to be more trouble than they were worth. And a few holdouts among the students and faculty are still using their unopened computer cartons as lamp tables, including one professor who says he will never use a machine that he cannot understand...
...blended into magically extended evenings; weekends were spent at the beach and at barbeques. Spontaneity was the key and idle recreation the goal. But now, as the first nipping chill of winter creeps into the air, and mid-terms rear their ugly heads, those sweet memories become obscured, made dim and vague by the pressing realities of fall term...