Word: nail
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...intensity was visible but somewhat shaded in Short Cuts and The Last of the Mohicans. In Blink she lets it rip. Emma Brody, blinded in early childhood, plays the violin in an Irish rock band, and onstage she looks ethereal. Offstage her anger is like an exposed nail; it catches and tears at everyone who brushes against it. As the result of an operation, Emma begins to recover her sight, and curiously that renders her vulnerable. A world of blurs and shadows is scarier to her than the darkness she has known. One of these developing shadows, as it happens...
...murder mystery or Roseanne Connor's most recent family crisis. It is the fate of Lyle and Erik Menendez, the Beverly Hills, California, brothers awaiting a verdict on charges of murdering their parents. "One way or another, every day it comes up in conversation," says Rosalie Mignano, 29, a nail technician at the salon. "I've really come to care about them as people...
...best clue to what the country might be like without race as the nail upon which American identity is hung comes from Pap, in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, who upon learning a Negro could vote in Ohio, "drawed out. I says I'll never vote ag'in." Without his glowing white mask he is not American; he is Faulkner's character Wash, in Absalom, Absalom!, who, stripped of the mask and treated like a "nigger," drives a scythe into the heart of the rich white man he has loved and served so completely...
...land of economic opportunity above all. Nativist harassment of the newcomers, coupled with openly racist citizenship and immigration laws, encouraged the impulse to get ahead financially without bothering about assimilation into the mainstream society. Politics was something to be avoided. As an old Far Eastern maxim goes, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down...
...barest requirements of narration. No. 10, They Were Very Poor, takes the elements of a Southern sharecropper's life down to the static minimum: a man and a woman staring at empty bowls on a bare brown plane, an empty basket hung on the wall by an enormous nail -- the sort of nail you imagine in a crucifixion. There isn't a trace of the sentimentality that coats Picasso's Blue Period miserablisme...