Word: sere
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...COMEDIANS. The title belies the inexorably arid and sere setting in which an excellent cast of villains and victims (Richard Burton, Peter Ustinov, Alec Guinness, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Ford) is touched by a vagrant grace...
Worst of the blazes was in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles. Feeding on sere brush, the flames romped through cordons thrown up by 1,400 firemen and raced toward the wealthy residential areas of Lemon Heights, Cowan Heights, Villa Park and Orange Park Acres. Hundreds of residents were routed; 52 buildings were destroyed, most of them houses-some costing...
Whether in devastated wartime London or an overgrown jungle throbbing to the heart of the matter, the landscape of Graham Greene's novels is inexorably arid and sere. Yet in the midst of a life that is rather worse than purgatory and scarcely better than hell, his characters are touched by a vagrant grace. The Comedians, for which he wrote a script based on his novel, is Greeneland all over again, this time in Haiti. Off a ship and into the damned, doomed country walk three anonyms: Brown, Jones and Smith...
...said earlier, since there is only one source for the text, and that a corrupt one, Macbeth has provided a field day for textual emendators. In Macbeth's famous remark, "My way of life/Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf," Houseman has adopted Dr. Johnson's emendation of "May" for "way." In the same speech, the Folio offers, "This push/Will cheere me ever, or dis-eate me now." Among the conjectures are "disease," "disseize," "defeat," and "dis-ease." I myself like to understand "chair" (which was pronounced "cheer" then), with which "disseat" makes perfect sense. Houseman too settles...
...August at the Hotel Ozone is a shattering splice of life after the third World War. No one is left alive except eight young women and one old one (Beta Poničanová), who wander like nomads over the sere landscape. The nubile girls have never seen a man; their leader can scarcely remember what one looks like. Equipped with some of the trappings of the defunct civilization-tin cans, rifles, combat boots-they live like savages, telling the years by counting the rings of a tree trunk, hunting by blasting fish out of the river water with grenades...