Word: gothically
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nonetheless, Scully does not tread wearily through the book's itinerary (ancient Greek and Roman architecture, the Gothic cathedrals of France, Renaissance Florence, Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte, etc...); rather, he takes to it with abandon, incorporating a sensitivity to the literary and cultural context that surrounds the buildings he studies, and using a sparkling rhetorical style that enlivens a subject liable to be wearied by either dense technical jargon or the purple prose of art speak...
...Gothic cathedral presents an idea of the experience of divine transcendence, and the French classical garden presents a conception of the nature of social hierarchy and authority. Over the course of the book, Scully establishes a link between the matter of Paradise-creating and the ideas that lie behind...
This parallels the developments in English landscape gardening in the 18th century, in which an ideal natural setting was created (including architectural fragments such as ersatz Greek temples and Gothic churches); this setting bears little resemblance to nature itself. The garden is, in fact, an environment just as artificial as the city...
...price of one. The Prince of Tides may be the biggest bargain of these recessionary holidays. Excessive is the word for director Barbra Streisand's movie -- and not an entirely pejorative one either. It is adapted -- by Pat Conroy and Becky Johnston -- from Conroy's romantic, sentimental and gothic novel, which has attracted a passionate following precisely because, in an age when most serious fiction has a pinched quality, his work is so gloriously unbuttoned...
Bradshaw's message is plumbed from the depths of his own troubled and lonely childhood, which was spent being shuttled between relatives in Houston. During his lectures, he spins out his story -- always with a smile -- recounting Southern-gothic tales of abuse, alcoholism and incest as examples of dysfunctional family behavior. There is Bradshaw's mother Norma, now 77, "a really good woman," he says, who became pregnant at 17 and married an alcoholic who abandoned her and their three children when Bradshaw, the middle child, was 10. She revered her own workaholic father as a saint, though Bradshaw...