Word: guttered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Raymond Chandler influenced the American detective novel so strongly that even his imitators have imitators. Among the best of the second-generation models is Robert B. Parker, 57, whose private investigator, Spenser, shares Philip Marlowe's gruff chivalry and, like Chandler's "Galahad of the gutter," bears the surname of an Elizabethan literary figure...
...questions of a personal nature are skirted, skimmed, finally finessed. He'd sooner study the lunch menu. "Do you eat cod?" he asks, looking up from the day's offerings. "Well, I don't. I eat haddock instead. Cod is full of worms. I once worked as a fish gutter, and I was supposed to pick the worms out. That was my job. But since you had to fill a certain quota of boxes in order to get paid, you often didn't bother to get all the worms...
...task is monumental, but Thomas perseveres even when mothers she loves desert her and return to the seductive glow of the crack pipe. "If they don't hear me now, they'll hear me later," she says. "Some will leave, start smoking rocks again and sink back to the gutter. But even when they're down there, they'll keep hearing Minnie. And they'll be back." It is a blessing that Minnie Thomas will be waiting...
...great solace from my garden." Barnes has landscaped an apartment terrace that looked like a heliport when he moved in. Stands of birches, pines and apple trees rustle in the winds on the 14th-floor roof. He smiles at his lofty thoughts. "It brings my mind out of the gutter," he adds. "If everybody could have a little plot of God's green earth in the city, it would be a better place...
According to Romantic superstition, poets either flame out young or gutter into unheralded old age. A related notion holds that popularity is intrinsically vulgar and hence earned, always, by inferior poems. The facts largely argue against this mythology, and the accomplishments of Richard Wilbur, 67, make it look silly. For more than 40 years, Wilbur has written poetry that garnered both critical acclaim and public recognition, including a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. He has taught at Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Smith, and generously given foreign authors an English-speaking readership, translating works by, among others, Anna Akhmatova...