Word: solemnness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Impeachment, by the way, is voted by the House--think of it as an indictment--but removal (conviction) is decided after a Senate trial. The framers were clear that impeachment is a solemn matter; to its credit, the House has generally taken the responsibility seriously. It has voted to impeach only one President and 15 other men--13 judges; President Ulysses Grant's Secretary of War; and Senator William Blount of Tennessee, who tried in the 1790s to get Indian tribes to invade Florida and Louisiana (then owned by Spain), kill a bunch of people and force the survivors' allegiance...
Entering the uncharted territory, we know we will find a solemn official district; there, the high formalities of impeachment will be performed--with circumlocutions that should be hilarious. Adjacent to this dignified marble complex will lie the sacramental dimension, the no less decorous churchy zone where repentance and forgiveness will be authenticated...
...motion picture atlas. Currier's distaste for dramatics, however, is somewhat crippling to her narrative, which so carefully withdraws from any hint of comedy or irony that it inches closer and closer to forsaking emotion altogether. Currier is clearly and artist of proficiency and discipline, but the solemn mood she so carefully constructs does not seem ideal for the project at hand. Passion is a messy, extravagant phenomenon, and a hard one to characterize from behind a poker face...
Deane's silken prose eventually weaves the thousands of shards of the narrator's family together into a whole, however unhappy. His blend of the happy and solemn is moving at times, worrisome at others and fascinating always. Although Deane, a professor at Notre Dame and a published critic and poet, is no stranger to writing, Reading in the Dark is his first venture into fictional territory. The boundary between poetry and fiction, especially for Deane, with that glowing prose, is not as stringent as that between the two Irelands; with any luck, this novel will not be his last...
...three-year-old. On Monday, when she left her parents' house, where she has been living since dropping out of college, she promised the daughter she calls "my angel" that Mommy would be right back. Sadly, though, crank squeezes time like an accordion, and since Jennifer swore her solemn maternal oath, approximately 100 hours have passed in a sleepless, virtually food-free blur of hurried parking-lot drug deals, marathon bouts at the video poker machine and frantic cigarette runs to the mini-mart...