Word: primal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Civilization and Its Discontents. But the analysis rarely gets past the obvious; when it does, it sometimes veers toward the dubious. Freud's ideas about the evolutionary history of our species are now considered--to put it charitably--dated. He hypothesized, for example, that our ancestors lived in a "primal horde" run by an autocratic male until one day a bunch of his sons rose up, murdered him and ate his flesh--a rebellion that not only miraculously inaugurated religion but somehow left a residue of guilt in all subsequent descendants, including us. Any questions...
...weird place to be because in pop, women are always an endangered species. From Elvis to Eddie Vedder, modern pop has been a guy's game; the primal image is of a man and his guitar, the tortured satyr and his magic lute. And the women? They can scream in the audience or maybe sing backup. In childhood girls are no more encouraged to pick up a Les Paul Black Beauty than pilot an F-16. They are expected to play only one instrument: the voice...
...trudge through the snow for dinner and when I was there you could sneak onto the roof and find a perfect spot to make snow angels. But I think it basically sucks to miss out on that crucial part of the Harvard experience. I have never seen the primal scream in all its naked, dancing glory, and I am sorry to say it will suck even more for Union dorm residents when they no longer have the advantage of being closest to dinner...
...goodbye before separately committing suicide. For a writer to pull this off utterly without mawkishness is astonishing. And jolting; what's common among mannerly short-story writers is to leave the reader, in a muted last paragraph, with a carefully polished pebble of irony. Jones leaves a chunk of primal matter, painful to hold, thrown up from volcanic depths...
This is the primal theme -- rying to bring the dead back to life- - that has preoccupied Casper's executive producer, Steven Spielberg, in E.T. and Poltergeist, Always and Jurassic Park. The new film is sprightly enough to conceal its subtext from censorious politicians. But children, who dwell in fear at least as much as in innocence, may get the message: that it would be cool, bitchin', totally awesome to join the Dead Kids Society...