Word: gossiper
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...besides, was to be left alone." Time sweeps everything along in its great, slow spiral: Gram's farm, Uncle Dan's butcher shop, Celia's beauty. People and houses move for a while with the current, then drop away to be replaced by hazy afterimages-family gossip, family myth. This musing, brooding, backward-looking novel, the author's first, summons up scenes of middle-aged women huddling over coffee across a kitchen table, talking in murmurs not always audible. It recalls the memorable time when Katie, who must have been about ten, wriggled under the stall...
...Brand's novel solutions is to go to the networks. These are the hundreds of systems, many of them formed by amateur enthusiasts, that hook computer users together via telephone lines, permitting their members to exchange information, engage in long-distance debates or just gossip. The networks are in effect electronic bulletin boards. "They are the 20th century equivalent of the coffeeshops of Samuel Johnson's day," Brand has said. "Back then, the intelligentsia got loaded on coffee and tried to impress themselves. We'll get loaded on technology and do the same thing...
...truth, a private posing as a general. A proverb is anonymous human history compressed to the size of a seed. "Whom the gods love die young" implies a greater tragedy than anything from Euripides: old people weeping at the grave site of their children. "Love is blind" echoes of gossip in the marketplace, giggling students and clucking counselors: an Elizabethan comedy flowering from three words...
...Club, the inner sanctum for Thoroughbred horse breeders and other bluebloods, is about as smugly exclusive as such places get. Lexington's upper-class chat just now should be preoccupied with the annual Keeneland yearling sale in three weeks. Instead, each day the conversations are thicker with unsavory gossip: a federal grand jury meeting in Lexington has been hearing testimony reportedly about cocaine use, illegal gambling and prostitution, and will reconvene next week. The New York Times stirred up the city even more with a long front-page story on the investigation...
While Madden and her circle have always been the subject of gossip and raised eyebrows, most people have not lost sight of what really makes Lexington run: its Thoroughbreds. "We take it [breeding] seriously," says Horsewoman Mary Jane Gallaher. "It's more important whether a foal is upside down in a mare than whether a few flake-out Louies are playing weird games on the side...