Word: restlessness
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...McGinnis, like a Studs Terkel of the Arctic, fills his latest book with the words and appearances of people: the restless, the desperate, the shifty-eyed, the rowdy, the stupid, the tough, the stubborn, the stoned and the drunk. He listens to the beery yarns, life histories, and why-we-came-to-Alaska expoundings of a motley assortment of fast dealers, Dangerous Dan McGrews, crazed clergymen, plain folks, hippies keeping warm and dry and happy snorting cocaine, bartenders, flinty newspaper editors, pipeline workers, various well-and-not-so-well-intentioned politicians, naturalists and whores. All of them seem to lean...
McGinnis' book, like its subject, is unfinished. He packs it with the energy, diversity, and extremity of our last frontier, but he leaves it too raw. It becomes construction noise and restless people passing through. Alaska has not made any sense of itself yet, and neither has McGinnis. There is too little attempt to understand what he has recorded. Nevertheless, he presents the real scene, the graceless complete one. It has the robust glow and toughness of the Alaska that is one huge ragged edge of America...
...might have been a disaster. Merton was so restless in infancy, his mother recorded, that only by singing to him could she quiet him sufficiently to dress the boy. His artist father, a New Zealander, cultivated his son's passion for the creative; the talented but apparently frustrated American mother gave him a compulsion to be perfect. That Thomas would long feel unloved may well have come from his desperate efforts to please this fastidious woman. When she lay dying of cancer, she refused to let her children see her; she sent the six-year-old Thomas a farewell...
This week each campaign will try new strategies to get their messages across more forcefully to a restless and often disaffected public. On Sunday, Carter started a series of 20-minute radio speeches, the first focusing on the economy, and the G.O.P. challenger initiated a series of nationally televised Reagan Reports, five-minute discussions to be aired three times a week. In addition, Reagan and Vice Presidential Candidate George Bush are scheduling seven or eight live broadcasts of question-and-answer sessions, plus, perhaps, one of Reagan talking about issues...
Harlan (Dennis Lipscomb) thinks he's Bogie: swatting his cigarette lighter open, swigging Seagram's from a pint bottle, talking tough to the little lady. He's not. He's a middle-aged shlemiel of an accountant-a surly, sulky Bob Newhart-with a restless young wife and a fatal case of paranoia. Lillian (Deborah Harry) thinks she's Betty Bacall: purple nightgowns, lots of makeup and suggestive patter, gentleman friend on the side. She's not. She's a housewife who cannot keep house, and whose only escape from her drab apartment...