Word: quotidian
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...this is precisely what charm protects us against, by allowing us to take pleasure in the quotidian, to fill each day with a bit of joie de vivre. "If you have it," as the British writer J.M. Barrie so astutely realized, "you don't need anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have...
...look to the river. The Charles, like the Cam, the Tiber and the Tigris before it, carries a hefty symbolic weight (along with a number of dirty secrets). Its banks provide ample ground for strolling, musing, jogging and Pointillist flights of fancy; its water gives necessary distance from the quotidian city. And its lovely bridges pay homage to generations of Harvard successes...
This quiet, quotidian scene occupies roughly the first one-fifth of Don DeLillo's The Body Artist (Scribner; 128 pages; $22) and is followed abruptly by an obituary: Rey Robles, 64, a Spanish-born film director prominent for a time in the late 1970s, has shot and killed himself in the Manhattan apartment of his first wife. After a brief account of Robles' life and career and a reference to his later problems with alcoholism and depression, the article concludes, "He is survived by his third wife, Lauren Hartke, the body artist...
...push." Although he may not be cut out for the comedy circuit, he is more than capable behind the camera, balancing the adrenaline and pressure of the stage with the banality of a comic's everydayness. Further, Gilman reveals that a comedian's bits and humor often dominate their quotidian affairs. In his personal life, Tim surrounds himself with comics, constantly finds a witty response for comments and makes his identity revolve around the persona of a comic. He never seems to be off; comedy surrounds his life in all its facets, even to the brink of annoyance and inappropriateness...
This is writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's native ground, and as he did in last year's coolly creepy sleeper The Sixth Sense, he uses it brilliantly. Nobody grounds the supernatural in the quotidian--especially the lower-middle-class variety, where the struggle to make the rent can equal the struggle to understand the unseen--more persuasively than Shyamalan does...