Word: levying
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many great writers have been obliged to moonlight, some at seemingly incongruous occupations. Christopher Marlowe was a government spy, Henry Fielding a criminal-court justice, Franz Kafka an insurance-company clerk and Herman Melville a customs inspector. Among living writers, Primo Levi has held perhaps the most improbable job. For two decades the Italian author worked as a commercial chemist, analyzing resins and rock samples for makers of varnish and other products. Can literature spring from such mundane matter? Chemistry would seem as impenetrable to the literary imagination as lead...
Nonetheless, as this affecting memoir demonstrates, chemistry in the right hands can be a powerful muse. For Levi, every compound has a distinctive personality. Hydrochloric acid "is one of those frank enemies that come at you shouting from a distance . . . After having taken in one breath of it you expel from your nose two short plumes of white smoke, like the horses in Eisenstein's movies." Chemistry's periodic table, which arranges the elements according to their atomic number, is Levi's metaphor for the relationships that compose a human life. The Periodic Table consists of 21 episodes, most...
...committee includes: former congressman from Missouri Richard Bolling; former Attorney General and President of the Univ. of Chicago, Edward Levi; chief executive of the former Itech Corporation, Franklin Lindsay; Philip F. Hughes from the Smithsonian Institute; Philip Buchen, a Washington attorney and former counsel to President Ford; and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Joseph Califano...
...Dorothea Lange's lens. This is an unashamedly political film, spoiling to pin responsibility for the small, independent farmer's troubled times on the shrugging shoulders of the Reagan Administration. However majestic Jewell Ivy (Jessica Lange), her husband Gil (Sam Shepard) and their teen-age son Carlisle (Levi L. Knebel) may appear in profile against the Iowa sky, they are still vulnerable to being devoured in the tractor tracks of bureaucracy. And Gil, a defiant homesteader who can't take maybe for an answer, is in danger of losing his family and his self-respect when...
Jeans manufacturers are battling back by the time-honored commercial expedient of working both sides of that same street. Thirty percent of Lee's line is now fashion jeans, which feature snappy colors and snazzy fabrics. Levi's, keeping its "older cohort" in mind, will turn out stuff specifically for them: not, as might be expected, denim editions of Roman soldier gear, but a line of shirts, sweaters and slacks designed by Perry Ellis. Brooke Shields is fronting her own line of sportswear and highlights a kind of prefab insouciance. With all this, however, tradition will...