Word: plumbing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Return, 1915, De Chirico's train has once more entered the city; its black silhouette is plumb in the center of the looming gray facades; a bright ball of vapor hovers directly above its smokestack. Perhaps it comes from the train and is near us. Or possibly it is a cloud on the horizon, lit by the sun that never penetrates the buildings, in the last electric-blue silence of dusk. It contracts the near and the far, enchanting one's sense of space. The early De Chiricos are full of such effects. Et quid amabo nisi quodaenigma...
...responsibility of the press, in Barber's view, is to plumb a candidate's background and his knowledge of the facts, the press did that job well with Reagan. He was not so much unknown as too simply perceived. The press had to get past Reagan's aw-shucks actor's persona and also avoid another parody-the straw-filled scarecrow wild man the Carter people created. Reporting gave the voters a plausible portrait of a 9-to-5 executive, only passably informed, given to exaggerated remarks but cautious in action, who wants complicated problems reduced...
Inevitably, many of their would-be captors get flash-fried by Charlie, whom her father calls "one great big Zippo lighter." They are imprisoned for six excruciating months while the agency tries to plumb their powers. Equally inevitably, there is ultimately a vast and glorious incineration at the Shop...
...certain knowledge that in a New Hampshire family, what has been cooked as food, however pulpy and woeful, must be eaten. Woodpiling is a form of boastfulness left over from colonial times, and it consists of erecting in plam sight an unnecessarily large and stately pile of cordwood, with plumb sides and flashy square corners. Such a fortress wrests envy, respect and despair, as it is intended to, from all New Hampshire males and a good many homesteading females who have not yet bucked, split and stacked their own supply of wood for the winter. In my town, for instance...
...hair. This is every lousy cartoon which demented, misguided youths have ever forced you to watch. This is every sex-and-death dime novel you've frantically glanced over in the back section of the corner magazine stand. Imagine them all together and they can't begin to plumb the depths to which the Cramps sink...