Word: manically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...story-lines in Garp a little less wonderful. While the book continued to sell rapidly, an inverse reaction occurred in literary circles. The jury went back into session on Irving and produced a revised verdict, charging him with excessive, gratuitous treatment of human fears and tragedy in his manic writing...
...Lenny, the conductor, lecturer, composer and 63-year-old Wunderkind. Family Matters follows all the Bernsteins from obscurity to celebrity, traveling the pull of Lenny's powerful slipstream. As Burton tells it, the early conditions were not propitious for fame. Sam, the father, was a successful businessman, a manic-depressive and a parochial ethnocentric (in later years he would refer to Dwight Eisenhower as General Eisenberg and to Adlai Stevenson as Steve Adelson). He did not regard music as an occupation for a nice Jewish boy, and along the way he made life miserable not only for his children...
...Tsar and Tsarina believed him to be: the savior of Holy Russia. But even if Rasputin had been an angel, he would have been too late. "A kind of frenzy has seized people," Princess Catherine Radziwill wrote in 1913. Russia had turned into a "very large lunatic asylum" of manic searchers, from table-tapping spiritualists to bomb-tossing anarchists. The whole country seemed possessed by demons and redeemers-and who could tell the difference...
...Lily Tomlin? In her upcoming television special, Tomlin eerily metamorphoses into Purvis Hawkins, "the Messiah of Soul." Purvis is one of three new characters who will join Tomlin's company of creations. The other newcomers: Holly Oneness, a burned-out '60s folk singer, and Agnes Angst, a manic-depressive deeply into the "heavy mental" new wave sound...
...manic overstimulation of American culture also makes excellence rarer. The great intellectual flowering of New England in the 19th century (Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, Longfellow, et al.) resulted in part from the very thinness of the New England atmosphere, an under-stimulation that made introspection a sort of cultural resource. America today is so chaotically hyped, its air so thick with kinetic information and alarming images and television and drugs, that the steady gaze required for excellence is nearly impossible. The trendier victims retreat to sealed isolation tanks to float on salt water and try to calm down...