Word: septic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...From whom did Tocqueville, while touring American suburbs, steal his famous one-liner that "the grass is always greener over the septic tank"? Hint: Henry David Thoreau is a good guess, but wrong...
...carted their kids to Cub Scout meetings. Bill tinkered around the house, and pieced out his teacher's salary by painting houses and working at the post office on school vacations. Erma, he says, was always repainting or redecorating, moving the furniture around. There was, of course, a septic tank, and in the summer, says Erma, "you could see that little sucker sink into the ground and you'd think, 'There goes another $400.' " But there weren't many one-liners: "Who was there to listen...
...effect has been devastating. At least 50% of the soil has oxidized and eroded, in some places exposing the barren lime rock. Buried septic tanks on Lake Okeechobee's shores have surfaced. The lake itself has receded, from a depth of 17 ft. in the 1960s to 9 ft. last year. Alligators have lost most of their eggs to artificial flooding in three of the past five years. Flooding also led to the deaths of 5,000 deer last year. The region's spectacular wading birds, many of them rarities, are equally threatened. Wood storks, for example, have...
...chapter on Edmund Wilson, "The Critic as Wound-Dresser," is overblown and a bit self-serving. Edel refers to the Greek myth of Philoctetes, a great archer who was banished because a septic injury offended the noses of his countrymen. Wilson himself read this as an allegory of the artist as outcast. As embellished by Edel, Wilson the critic is like Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, who endured the stench and nursed the archer. Wound-dresser is a limited and benign definition of a critic who laid open many a reputation with one stroke...
...much. They prefer two-or-three-chord junk food--who said rock and roll wasn't about arrested development? Of course the songs on Get Happy!! didn't "breathe"--they were choked with carbon monoxide and tears of boredom, frustration, rage. Elvis was a ferret trapped in a septic tank...He got his rocks off that time, the fury dribbled out, and Trust is his depressing post-coital meditation--no longer an active participant. Elvis watches us all from the stage. Trust, his most objective album, is also his least taut: it breathes, and sometimes it hyperventilates. The songs...