Word: morbidly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Morbid, introspective and peevish, De Chirico belonged to the company of the great convalescents: Cavafy, Leopardi, Proust. The city was his sanatorium and, as a fabricator of images that spoke of frustration, tension and ritualized memory, he had no equal. No wonder the surrealists adored his early work and adopted its strategies wholesale. The "illusionist" painters among them, Dali, Ernst, Tanguy and Magritte, all came out of early De Chirico, a lineage astutely discussed by Laura Rosenstock in the catalogue; and as another contributor, Wieland Schmied, points out, German painters in the '20s like George Grosz used Chirican motifs...
...that for the first time in years after a presidential meeting I was free of tension. It was impossible to talk to Nixon without wondering what other game he might be engaged in. It was exciting but draining, even slightly menacing. With Ford, there were no hidden designs, no morbid suspicions, no complexes. I reflected again on the wisdom of providence. Gerald Ford was clearly not Nixon's first choice as successor; John Connally was. I could think of no public figure better able to lead us in national renewal than this man so quintessentially American, of unquestioned integrity...
...departure for Ruisdnel, these paintings depcit an allegorical subject. Moonlight strikes a tomb, a ruined cathedral looms in the background, dead beeches litter the foreground, shrouded women walk among the graves, all of which suggests the hopeless mortality of man and his inevitable doom. But Ruisdael is not entirely morbid, and he inclines a faint but perceptible rainbow on the horizon--a glimmer of hope and he possibility of rebirth...
...Hayman's attitude towards Kafka, it is, not surprisingly, less reverential that Max Brod's; Brod's biography seemed to be written chiefly as an antidote to the view that anyone who created Gregor Samsa must have been a dark and morbid character, though Brod's work is honest and engaging, we almost lose sight of all the self-torture in the radiance of the saint-like glow. Hayman's biography is more balanced, but also admiring (as anyone must be) of Kafka's incredible lack of cynicism, even as he was dying...
...most of the time it works. White cleverly knocks the values of a bureaucratic society in an imaginary letter to the tax collector, and the nosiness of certain do-gooders in a similar missive to the ASPCA. The morbid obsession with news is caricatured in the (very funny) story of a family--"marooned" on the island where they have always lived--that is killed when as Associated Press helicopter crashes from on high, the even more morbid obsession with games ridiculed in a lampoon of a future sport-mad-society where 197,000 would jam the Yale Bowl...