Word: portentousness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Author Weston, 39, was trained as a singer but now teaches English in California. He takes high risks with his prose, alternating portent-filled silence with runs of gaudy phrase. Yet the alternation works, because the book is an imitation of memory, and visual memory often works that way too. In the end, the teacher finds past and possibility gone, but he has arrived at himself. The author knows what it is to be a creature of time...
...coastline, the Western seashore is sparsely settled. For another, much of the coast lacks the complicated riverine-estuarian system of the Gulf region and the Atlantic Coast. There are, for example, few natural harbors along the shoreline that would draw heavy industries. But Southern California already seems an ominous portent of the coastline's fate. A huge population, temperate weather and a vast expanse of ocean frontage have turned much of this area into a Miami of the West. Bays and marshes have been filled in to make room for more houses and marinas, and oil spills have stained...
Tourism Campaign. Many of Sadat's ventures depend on an Egypt at peace-a hopeful portent for the negotiations with Israel. Aristotle Onassis flew into Cairo last week to check the possibilities of pumping oil through a proposed $250 million pipeline from the Gulf of Suez to Alexandria. Since the line would cross stretches of sand now dotted by Soviet missiles, Onassis said that he would return in six weeks, when the Jarring talks should be in better focus. The Suez Canal Co. has ordered a $2,400,000 Dutch dredger that could deepen the canal...
They are suffering and have suffered enormously. The fact that the massive bombing in Laos goes on unprotected, with C. I. A.-trained mercenaries to fight on the land, seems to me an ominous portent of the use of American bombs and Asian mercenaries to fight for what we cannot afford to win with our lives...
...easy. It's getting back out that's a problem. Once the first half of this concert had plunged itself into the lower depths, nothing could lure it back. As the gastroenterologists settled back into their seats, and the balcony dwellers returned from the bar, a sudden portent of doom came over me. A portent, as it turns out, eminently justified...