Word: soberness
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...Head of the Charles is hardly a sober event, not when boats spill up against one another and collide with bridges. Many crews never even make it past the first turn, on Magazine Beach, where last year a heap of fours collided with each other and a committee boat, landing them all on the littered shores. Anderson Bridge usually claims a few, especially when the coxswain do not anticipate the subtle curve at the bridge...
Before he began the task of sifting through some 4,500 surviving letters by Evelyn Waugh, Editor Mark Amory wondered if the author's handwriting was difficult to read. A friend reassured him: "No, no, you see he wrote his letters in the morning, when he was sober. He wrote his diary at night when he was drunk." On the evidence of the 840 letters collected here, Waugh sometimes tippled while he corresponded, but the contrast between this book and his Diaries (published in 1977) is as vivid as that between a buoyant raconteur and a mean lush. Here...
...faith never wavered, but neither did it save him from dipsomaniacal binges. He asked Author Nancy Mitford, a favorite correspondent: "Did I ever come to visit you again after my first sober afternoon. If so, I presume I owe you flowers." As he ruefully described the times he was "d.d." (disgustingly drunk) in his letters, Waugh made himself one of his better comic characters: "I got to my train d.d. and it was the Cheltenham Flier full of respectable stockbrokers . . . and I walked down the train picking up all the mens hats and looking inside and saying: 'People...
...rhythms--to a murky vision of a world without order or hope. Bowie last peered into this world on Diamond Dogs, where more conventional music illustrated a post-apocalyptic desolation. Diamond Dogs was a desperate album, the kind you might not want to listen to unless you were sober. But Scary Monsters is more chilling--it's not suffering the effects of catastrophe, but trembling on its edge...
...poetic consistency of Hopper's vision now seems far more interesting than the unadventurous vanguardism of most "advanced" American painting in the '20s and '30s, that is partly because it was grounded in 19th century France: especially in Manet, whose work Hopper studied and copied. The sober painterliness of Hopper's style, its reliance on the single brush mark to enunciate form, came ultimately from Manet; so did his passion for meticulous truth of tone; and so, especially, did the "emptiness" of his compositions, with their emphatic blocks of shadow, their wide, flat planes of wall...