Word: torporous
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...hears the din in Khartoum where the Blue and the White Niles meet and in a southern Sudan sapped to a "hopeless torpor" by epidemic. The specific character and hardship of a place are conveyed with arresting brevity. On the hard desert of the Muslim north: "It depressed me to see the starved, tethered donkeys outside suffering while the fat ones ate, and the thirsty chickens dashing for a chance to peck at our spit." In the river town of Gelhak he records the visual cacophony in Polaroid prose: "We saw a man with a monkey's nose...
...have periods of action and passion and reform," says Schlesinger, "until the country is worn out, and then periods of passivity, negativism, quietism." The first two decades of this century were periods of action. "Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson wore the country out." Then came the relative political torpor of the '20s, followed by the fierce activity of the '30s and '40s, the quietism of the '50s, then the eruptions of the '60s and early '70s. After the introversion of the mid-and later '70s, Schlesinger believes, we may now be on the brink of an explosively creative time. Says...
...Rimbaud set to a tune suspiciously like Smith's only hit, "Because The Night;" "Dancing Barefoot," in which she sings with more precision than she has yet managed; and "Broken Flag," a sweeping anthem to her curious idea of America. But even these tracks partake of the torpor that fills the rest of the record. During her last tour, Smith padded sheepishly around the stage and did her best to play cute. The music on Wave acts identically, and neither escapes with a shred of credibility...
...that they know shows are frequently lousy but don't know how to change things. It's not really fair to generalize like this-- particularly since there are many talented directors, writers, and actors, some of whom have the energy and intelligence to motivate themselves even amid the general torpor--but one's general impressions are sometimes important. Harvard theater is comfortable; many of those involved don't really care about anything as grandiose as Drama or Theater--they care about having an outlet for their extracurricular energy, about making friends and having a good time. Nothing wrong there...
SOMETHING HAPPENS when you stay too long in the suburbs. Those inclined to harshness see it as a kind of dry rot, a slow and dusty torpor of the soul that accommodates itself all tooeasilyto the relentless affluence of Scarsdale and Grosse Pointe, to a world of shopping malls and Little League coaches and bitching at the mailman. Even at its best, suburban life breeds a brand of insularity, an isolated arrogance of comfort, that forces its own visions of itself into small places, like bedrooms and garages. Small places and small horizons--no better way to chronicle this world...