Word: lightly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Brodkey's central subject is the suffering child. The anguish chiefly arises from the loss, real or imagined, of parents and their protection (Largely an Oral History of My Mother; His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft). Brodkey's family histories tend to stretch out as interminable catalogs of emotion, pain and bereavement alternating with epiphanic flashes of elation: "In my memories of this time of my life, it seems to be summer all the time, even when the ground is white: I suppose it seems like summer because I was never cold." Moments like this almost redeem...
...fold. But the struggle for their hearts and minds is oddly disembodied. Even a Dukakis visit to Toledo last week was merely a cameo for the cameras. Here, as elsewhere, the election has become largely reduced to the impressions created by the 300,000 tiny points of light on a television screen...
...shopping for sapphires, silks and lacquerware in an air-conditioned arcade, an evening dining in spicy splendor along the Chao Phya River, and a night on Patpong, the most freewheeling bar strip in the world. Pleasure becomes business in a city that is both sedative and stimulant. At first light you can ride along the back canals around the Temple of the Dawn, where saffron-robed monks paddle from river house to river house collecting food; in the morning you can lose yourself amid the chapels, bejeweled Buddhas and murals of the 60-acre Grand Palace, in the midst...
...left alone; it begs, almost, to be compromised, homogenized, packaged or roughed up. And Thailand has certainly been industrious in marketing its smiles. By now, 77 companies offer hill-tribe treks in Chiangmai alone, and Pattaya, a quiet fishing village just two decades ago, is a bloated red-light area studded with 256 hotels. Indeed, the metaphor of selling out is given flesh by the embarrassing statistics of Thailand's sex trade: perhaps 250,000 women in Bangkok alone respond to the siren call of a business that goes hand-in-hand with tourism. And the get-rich-quick promise...
...purpose jeer "It sucks" also gave us gonzo journalism, that self-consciously hip form of social commentary. The conventions are rather rigid. The reporter should work for a publication that is liberal in both its outlook and expense-account policies. He should know not only how to do light drugs and hold his liquor but also how to fold these manly vices into the copy...