Word: luridly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...back alive. Therein American viewers, waiting to see Johnny Carson, were treated to the sight of a now-dead reporter interviewing and filming scores of people just a few hours before the deal went down for all of them. Never before have we been able to witness a lurid event in such detail. While the coverage has been good from an informational standpoint, it is somehow uncomfortable...as if it were an invasion of the dead's privacy...and unquestionably in poor taste. If you doubt that, take a quick look at the way Newsweek and Time featured bloated corpses...
...only tacked on at the beginning and at the end of the book. By and large, For Her Own Good is easy and entertaining to read right down to the footnotes. Crusading women are eminently quotable. Obsolete medical practices with an "inherent drift toward homicide" make for interesting, if lurid reading. Ehrenreich and English even render the home economics movement bearable...
Eleven crimson and eleven silver flecks of light danced under an indigo mist in the lurid last minutes of a Harvard-Brown game that held 23,000 at Harvard Stadium entranced on Saturday afternoon...
Especially in the middle of the novel, Gordon's prose--saturated with adjectives; empty, if not revolting characters; and lurid sexual details--reads like something out of Mademoiselle or Ladies' Home Journal (in both she has published short stories). but when Margaret, Isabel's old housekeeper, reappears towards the end, the writing tightens up again. Margaret practically embodies that stubborn, un-American subculture, which the author seems to identify with Catholicism. Even if Final Payments lacks a clear message and Mary Gordon's language often crumples under the weight of her cliches, at least one gets the sense...
Illuminating this lurid world is equally unsettling music. Oliver, who studied electronic music at Oxford, composed his Duchess for an undergraduate production in 1971 and revised it last year. The opera opens with a blaring cacophony of brasses and winds. Voice and orchestra lines seem to begin and end with little regard for each other. Only once, in the final act, does Oliver use a straightforward melodic passage. A chorus of madmen, a ghoulish group in feathers and rags, sings an elegant baroque masque to the imprisoned Duchess (Soprano Pamela Myers). The contrast between stately chords and hideous faces...