Word: visitor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Pinter room. Anyone who has seen almost any of Harold Pinter's plays will know exactly what that phrase means. A cold, unwelcoming, claustrophobic chamber, in which the inhabitants live in anticipation of a visitor - a threat to their dingy equilibrium. Pinter's plays have been performed all over the world, from Australia to China, and an awful lot of people have recognized those lonely rooms...
...grass once stood at attention. When a group of 600 garden-club members visited her property on a tour, it was not the well-tended flower beds but the meadow that generated the most excitement. "Many of the women just stood in the middle of it," she recalls. A visitor said she was envious of the unfettered habitat but admitted that she doubted her neighbors would allow it. Suburban homogeneity, it seems, can be harder than lawns to uproot...
...discuss normally taboo subjects, like the yakuza, the royal family and discrimination against Koreans?topics the mainstream media either sanitizes or simply won't touch. "The Emperor is a war criminal. How is it that we haven't yet done away with the Imperial system?" asks an outspoken visitor to the history page. "In Japan, the press has had a monopoly over information," says Tomofumi Akiyama, a lawyer who specializes in multimedia law. "The Internet has opened the door for everyone to gather and transmit information...
Nathan, an only child, cares for his ill mother at home in an unnamed state. Once on a thriving farm, the house now sits in a giant, fallow field, isolated except for the occasional visitor. Chief among these is the narrator, Richard, Nathan's best friend and a bit of a moralizer, and Jessica, the friend that Nathan has a secret crush on, but who's engaged to another. Things change suddenly for Nathan when Jessica sleeps with him, but has severe morning-after regrets. As if this weren't alienating enough for Nathan, his mother passes away...
...deceased?a common practice in Taiwan?do so halfheartedly, whimpering rather than weeping. The funeral cloth is ragged, flowers are wilted, the hearses old and decrepit. "The level of service here is disgraceful," says Deng Wen-lung, a university lecturer in life and death studies who has accompanied a visitor to the scene. "Taiwanese have to be taught they can demand something better...