Word: skies
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...first hint cropped up late last year: billboards displaying a giant photograph of lightning bolts across a dark sky and the enigmatic message YOU CAN'T HEAR IT COMING, BUT IT IS. Within weeks, it came. In a blaze of publicity, General Motors launched the nation's first mass-market electric car in modern times--a whisper-quiet, aerodynamic techno-marvel christened EV1. Thousands signed up to test-drive the spiffy two-seater, engineered with the help of rocket scientists to the tune of some half a billion dollars. So far, it is available only in California and Arizona...
...view here is, forget that asterisk. With the publication of The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (Houghton Mifflin; 190 pages; $23), a collection of novellas about men and women in nature, there should be no more avoiding plain truth: Rick Bass is a very good writer of fiction. What's more, he's good at a kind of writing that is often done with irritating self-consciousness. Bringing the natural world into a story as something more than scenery invites a rich array of overdelicate word-painting and drum-roll weather effects, with turning seasons or the death and birth...
...extract a Hopperish melancholy from Woman in a Window, 1957, though her face is averted. What she might be thinking doesn't count; she's a model, not a narrative. What does count is the confluence of vectors--the square window with its two planes of blue sea and sky, the tabletop rushing away to the right at a shallow angle, the triangle of the arm propping the head, and the woman's left hand drooping over the upper arm, its slack spiky fingers echoed in the red-and-blue stripes of a cloth draped over the chair...
...climax of Diebenkorn's work was, by general consent, the Ocean Park series, which he began in 1967. Ocean Park is part of Santa Monica, the beachside suburb of Los Angeles where he had his studio. From its high crystalline light, its big calm planes of sea and sky, its cuts and interlacings of highway divider and curb and gable and yellow sand, Diebenkorn produced a marvelous synthesis that, though prolonged through more than 140 large canvases, had very few weak moments...
...whereas the price of a traditional bond would go up only half as much. Right now the trend is toward lower rates. O'Higgins plans to ride the trend with zeros for at least another year. Such market timing is fraught with risk. But then so is riding a sky-high stock market. If beating the Dow is your pet cause, give this new dog a look. The old one may be lovable, but it doesn't hunt the way it used...