Word: gothic
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...WHITE DEVIL. A revival in modern dress recaptures all the gory gothic elements of John Webster's 17th century melodrama of destruction wrought by ambition, greed, murder and revenge...
Dirksen used to advantage a Senate rule by which no committee other than Appropriations may meet while the main body is in session. "I must insist on that rule," he intoned in his best steamboat-Gothic profundo. "I cannot, helter-skelter, permit one committee to meet and not another." Arkansas Democrat William Fulbright protested in vain that his Foreign Relations Committee urgently needed to review President Johnson's $275 million supplemental request for economic aid to South Viet Nam. The problem could easily be resolved, Dirksen countered, by getting Mansfield to withdraw his motion to take up repeal...
Hedda Hopper was the town's genial Scold, Buster Keaton its somber Sphinx; together, they were Hollywood past and present. Keaton's world-the gothic twilight of the silent movie, the pratfall, the Quixote on a treadmill-dimmed when the sound stage dawned. Hopper's world-of glamour, gossip and low jinks among the high-lifes-survived largely because she made it seem exciting even when it was dull. When TV nearly killed the movies, she helped rescue them with exposés and exclusives, chitchat and charm; to 30 million readers, Hedda Hopper was Celluloid City...
...decadence ride again in New South Wales. White's celebrated style, in its sidelong, suggestive, subjunctive way, might nudge a reader to the conclusion that this is like early Capote or Tennessee Williams. And, somehow, White has contrived to convert a scrubby Australian suburb into standard Old South gothic. Moldering mansions are in short supply Down Under, but White does what he can with "gothic" grass around the Brown house, wormy quince trees, and the house itself, which is a sort of Greek Revival temple done in clapboard. It is amazing what can be done with mutton...
...White intends to pluck a theological plum from the prunes of his style. For 20 years prestigious critics in both Britain and the U.S. have found in White the stuff of literary greatness. Dutifully following the critics' advice, the reader will find hints of great profundities behind the gothic facade. In the first place, the mandala does not simply demonstrate the exclusiveness of one consciousness from another's-even in twin brothers. Mandala does that brilliantly -the same events being seen in succession through the eyes of Waldo and Arthur. This literary flourish, however, is intended to reveal...