Word: mountained
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...does become uninteresting: one begins, at times, to wish for a hint of lives that are not being slowly ground down. But these are remarkably few weak points in a collection of 11 stories: and in stories like "The Half-Skinned Steer," "The Mud Below," and, most strikingly, "Brokeback Mountain," Proulx reasserts herself with a force that has grown and become refined since the fine Heartsongs collection. She has developed herself as a chronicler of memory, and her protagonists in these stories are more psychologically compelling than even the strongest characters in Heartsongs. The past bleeds silently and met seamlessly...
...second image field arose from a fascination with the power of the diametric opposite of nature--industrial imagery, seen as the essence of 20th century experience and as belonging more vividly to America than to any other place. If God was present in the mountain lake, he could also be uneasily satirized as a plumber's grease trap by the New York Dadaist Morton Schamberg; if sublimity was in the mountains, it was also in the skyscrapers of New York City and in the relentlessly massed geometric forms of the Ford auto plant at River Rouge, Mich., which Charles Sheeler...
...countercultural defiance. It's now a genre up for grabs, a space for marketing frenzies. Consequently, its prominent products comprise not much more than mediocre commercial formulas devoid of the creative zeal of yesteryear, aimed instead at providing new images for advertising agencies or at escalating the Billboard mountain. According to my boy, the recent Time "Hip Hop Nation" cover and Eminem's success story are symptoms of the culture's sad commercial zenith, comparable to the beginnings of the demise of every other form of black music of this century. It's all downhill from here...
Before the recent rise of so-called adventure expeditions, where you or I could pay thousands of dollars to be led to the top by an experienced climber, it was a fight of sheer willpower and a certain degree of obsession which brought climbers to the mountain. For many now, though, the goal is not the experience but the outcome--to be able to say, "I stood at the top of Everest." The danger remains, however. It's true that the process has been streamlined and improved, but the climb remains a kind of fatal tourist attraction without the purity...
...viewed Everest as a challenge worth taking for challenge's sake alone. In that brief answer, Mallory focused his energy on the job itself--the desire actually to climb, not to have climbed or to have returned victorious, but to climb and so conquer the mountain step by step. The pleasure and the motivation was in the action, not in the outcome--or expected outcome. Perhaps that is what John Mallory meant by requesting that the body remain undisturbed--his father died in the process of taking the challenge he had chosen. Whether he had completed it or failed...