Word: epically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...concerns extend well beyond these. He is convinced that major league baseball plays a bardic, mythic role in American society; the long, recurring seasons are an ongoing epic, Homeric or Vergilian or Dantesque, a vital locus of rapt assembly where enduring values are enacted and passed on. "The game is such a wonderful mix between the individual and the community," he says. "The struggle between the pitcher and batter throws these two isolated competitors into lonely relief. But the purpose of that confrontation is for the team, the benefit of the larger group...
Martin Scorsese's first achievement in The Last Temptation of Christ is to strip the biblical epic of its encrusted sanctimony and show biz. He has re- created -- in Morocco, and on a pinchpenny budget of $6.5 million -- a Palestine of sere deserts and balding meadows. It takes hard men to work this holy land, men who labor under the twin burdens of poverty and occupying oppression. Their clothes are dirt-dry and sweat-drenched. Their faces, most of them, boast Semitic heritage; their voices hold the raspy, urgent cadences of Brooklyn, Appalachia and other frontier outposts of working-class...
...champions must strive for it in a solitude as perfect as Jackie Joyner-Kersee's. Four years ago, she narrowly lost the gold medal because a hamstring pull hobbled her in the 800-meter run. Now she has so greatly outdistanced the field in the heptathlon, that epic ordeal in seven acts, that the only rival in the corner of her eye is the memory of her last triumph. Since 1984 she has set the heptathlon world record and bettered it twice; she has shared the world record in the long jump. Regardless of the success and the mental...
...blots out the realities of baggage deprivation and child-size seats like Tom Clancy, the minstrel of the military-industrial complex. Clancy's first thriller was a nuclear submarine epic, The Hunt for Red October, which was followed by another sturdy heavyweight, Red Storm Rising. He stumbled last year with Patriot Games, a frippery in which his customary hero, the supercool CIA man Jack Ryan, saved a British royal child from kidnaping. The problem was not that Patriot Games was silly, but that it was even sillier than real life...
...downtown, I boarded one of the system's older trains -- creaking, crotchety and covered with indescribable graffiti. I looked closer at one cluster of squiggles, spray-painted by the ubiquitous Taki 183. Was it . . .? Could it be . . .? Yes, there in Babylonian script were the opening words of the Gilgamesh Epic...