Word: scarlet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...What ever happened to the scarlet letter?" has become a major despairing theme of conservative political commentary. (Or, "Values, shmalues," as America's leading value peddler, William Bennett, summarized the apparent new culture consensus to the New York Times recently.) Social conservatives used to be smug populists who tarred their critics as out-of-touch elitists. Now they shoot furious thunderbolts at the formerly all-wise American people. Although the dismay of the sanctimony set is enjoyable to watch, their despair may be somewhat misplaced...
...toad, in part to show me their characteristics (one is poisonous), but mainly because he is still a kid who likes to go out and get frogs. In the morning, one of our guides spots a parrot high in a tree, a Fransemadam, so called because it spreads a scarlet frill when excited, like the gaudy costume of a French madam. I admire, take note of the bird and am ready to move on, but Mittermeier could stand under the tree for hours lost in the intellectual pleasure of seeing...
...Gustav Mahler received a death sentence. Although mortality had already permeated the composer's household (Mahler's beloved daughter died of scarlet fever a year before), his family was not destined to hang up their mourning garb quite yet. Another death was imminent. During a routine doctor's examination, Mahler was diagnosed with a fatal heart defect. Confronted with his mortality, Mahler was consoled by a new vision--immortality. His heart, his body and his memory would erode. His music, however, would not. Mahler was set to compose his legacy. His ink was his effigy; his fear of death...
There was a power there that is missing from Roth's latest big book, I Married a Communist. For a book with a scarlet cover, I Married a Communist ends up feeling more like an emergency room than a bloody battlefield. It has, like its predecessors, an angry Jew from Newark, but his passion never really climaxes, and his understanding of the world never really evokes sympathy. This man, irate Ira Ringold, is a 1950s radio star who has never given up the Communist passions he picked up as an uneducated GI and whose marriage to a Hollywood actress...
...they finally open themselves to these emotions (by gazing at a Picasso or hearing Buddy Holly or spending the evening with a naughty girl from the '90s), the people of Pleasantville literally blush into color. They wear their passion on their shamed, fervent faces, on their clothes, like a scarlet letter. And the town burghers, still cocooned in monochrome propriety, are perplexed, vexed, vengeful...