Word: drunkenness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Aristotle observed that "drunken and harebrained" women most often had children like themselves, "morose and languid." Eighteenth-century British physicians reported that drinking gin led not only to the widespread debauchery of the time-which was vividly depicted in Hogarth's etchings-but also to a spate of "weak, feeble and distempered children." Modern medicine has only recently confirmed the ancient folklore. Alcoholic mothers often do bear children with a host of birth defects: skull and facial deformations, defects in the cardiovascular system and mental and physical retardation...
...Waterston is the most maladroit Hamlet to appear on a professional stage in the past decade. He bears not the remotest resemblance to a prince. He is like a little boy throwing a nightlong temper tantrum. His twitchy gestures suggest those of a puppet on the strings of a drunken puppeteer. His voice is woefully devoid of resonance. He delivers the Shakespearean line like a squawk box in dire need of a lozenge. Add to this little humor and less thought, and Hamlet the Dane becomes Hamlet the Cipher...
...Bullins often uses a party as the central structure of his plays, and he does it again here. Even when it is slightly sick, a Bullins party jives. The people talk a vivid street idiom with the fluent opulence of jazz. Their moods dance. They make hot, sly, funny, drunken, sexy scenes together that have the cumulative impact of a seduction. Then they fall apart in revealing stop-motion monologues as if a petal were trying to be a flower...
...Tribute. Edmund Wilson's death in June 1972 really gave Exley something to grieve about. He was seized by the desire "to take something of Wilson to carry with me" because Wilson had been everything he was not: dignified, dedicated, the last survivor of the lost, drunken literary generation. What was more, there was a tenuous connection between the two men. Wilson's final years had been spent restoring his ancestral stone house in Talcottville, not far from Exley's native Watertown, N.Y. Exley had never met Wilson, but then he had barely met Gifford. His mission...
Rose's story is just as stark. Left motherless at twelve, she found herself successively at the mercy of a drunken father, the Southwold servants' hall, and a lecherous young master. Orphan Sarah's beginnings were livelier - and even more unpleasant. As a girl she is saved from impending rape in Whitechapel, but the man who saved her turned out to be a perverted missionary. By contrast, the weekly blend of world crisis and teapot tragedy at Eaton Place - where all the books end - seems calm indeed...