Word: understood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Desire is a small black hole in outer space, not understood, or calculated on, negative matter, into whose mouth we vanish...
...that edge the slave quarters of a Maryland plantation, her song wafts across the dark night. "Who's that yonder dressed in red?/ I heard the angels singing./ Looks like the children that Moses led./ I heard the angels singing." The plaintive melody is a mythic signal, readily understood: she is the "Moses" who is leading her people out of bondage. Moments after Harriet's song has ended, the passengers join her on the Underground Railroad, moving North to freedom...
Author Gates is best understood alongside the 19th century's great moral improvers. She is sister-in-arms to Melville, Hawthorne, Twain and Mrs. Stowe. All wanted their writing to better the public they were writing for-even when they despaired of civic improvement. Gates has yet to write a book that liberates as fully as it lacerates. But she cares about the national identity as no other living American novelist does. If she can steady her grip on her terrifying, transmogrifying wit, there may yet be a great novel in the already vast Gates canon...
...obsessive quality, achieving for the mid-seventies what Dr. Thompson did for the violence and insanity of the Nixon years. Nixon's debacle finished Thompson--it was a final irony for the president to drag along with him, when he retired to EI Cass Pacifica, the man who understood him best. So Thompson is holedup in Boulder Creek, listening to tapes of Jimmy Carter speeches and reading about himself in Doonesbury. Thompson was best in writing about thugs and goons, from San Bernadino's Hell's Angels and the burnt-out geeks of Las Vegas, to the inhabitants...
...indicators which pointed the finger at Haldeman and Ehrlichman. "Money was important, but only a few reporters wrote about it. I was zeroing in on it in July. Woodward and Bernstein did not really know the law of the land on Haldeman until late in the year. I understood at the earliest point that Haldeman had to have known, because he ran everything and I knew the way he operated--no one else there would ever do anything without checking first with Haldeman...