Word: sere
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...White Radiance, for example), suffers from a terrible and mostly undeserved reputation for fine writing. Perhaps to confront this slur head-on, he throws in some undeniably lavender flourishes on page 5 of his new best seller, Dixie City Jam (Hyperion; 367 pages; $22.95). "The wind was hot and sere," he reports. And "the sun looked like a white flame trapped inside the dead water." And "an occasional fork of lightning, like silver threads trembling inside the clouds." It's a weather bulletin delivered by choiring angels...
Mazurka is also concerned with the instability of time and memory in the face of war and death. As one character remarks, "Poe was right: our thoughts are palsied and sere, our memories treacherous, sere and rusted like old knives...it must be in the nature of things." Memory is a bridge but also a trap for Cela's villagers, especially tricky when dealing with murder and revenge as well as the civil war. For in consolidating fact and fiction, truth and myth, memory can create an epic out of everyday incidents. But Cela also questions the relevance and meaning...
...also allows the studio to sidestep all that messy artistic independence; the writer and the director have a blueprint they'd better stick to. "Studios don't like to take chances with something that hasn't been validated in another commercial form," says screenwriter-director Paul Schrader, whose sleek, sere new movie, The Comfort of Strangers, was adapted by Harold Pinter from Ian McEwan's novel. "A film like Silence of the Lambs would have never hit the screen had it been original material. It's just too raw. It could be filmed only because it had been a best...
...POWs' rapid capitulation only heightened concern about their treatment. These men, after all, have been schooled in the art of surviving in captivity. Since the early 1970s, each of the armed forces has been running men and women through a program called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape). The simulated POW experience includes incarceration in fenced compounds, sleep deprivation, interrogation and brainwashing. While military officials will not discuss the specifics of the seven-to-10-day courses, legal suits filed by troops who sustained injuries during the training attest to its realistic conditions...
DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES. Three children in a Liverpool family literally sing their way through two decades of air raids, poverty and a father's sere brutality. Prepare to be thrilled, perplexed, horrified, haunted...