Word: dreading
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This is the moment of existential dread. Naked onstage, with no props, no scenery, no place to hide. The audience is rapacious in its demands: loosen our inhibitions; make us laugh. Onstage, life is stripped to bare essentials. The voice, the timing, the jokes are your only weapons. Every second of uneasy silence is a little death. I launch into my monologue: "You've been reading about Kenneth Starr and grand-jury leaks. Well, I can't get one. I'm the Rodney Dangerfield of investigative reporters." A small laugh, less than a guffaw, more than a titter. But that...
FRANZ KAFKA (1883-1924) People who have never read his books recognize his last name as an adjective: Kafkaesque, a signature form of 20th century dread. During his brief life in Prague, he wrote about a web of inexplicable predicaments, as in The Metamorphosis (1915). What do you do when you wake up as an insect...
When a character in Monsieur Verdoux remarks that if the unborn knew of the approach of life, they would dread it as much as the living do death, Chaplin was simply spelling out what we've known all along. The Tramp, it seemed, was mute not by necessity but by choice. He'd tried to protect us from his thoughts, but if the times insisted that he tell what he saw as well as what he was, he could only reveal that the innocent chaos of comedy depends on a mania for control, that the cruelest of ironies attend...
...around the country, scientists are feverishly at work on drugs that target the products of specific genes--the very genes that make a cell cancerous. The hope is that these treatments will be more effective, longer lasting and far less toxic than traditional chemotherapy and radiation--treatments that inspire dread so deep that they are almost as feared as cancer itself...
...historical standards, Seinfeld does not have a very big audience. As we all know, the ratings for the networks have decreased markedly in the past few years as cable has become more popular, and the effect on even the top shows is startling. In the 1963-64 season, those dread Hillbillies averaged a rating of 39.1--in other words, they were being seen by 39.1% of all households with television sets. Back then, 90% of the nation's households had TVs, so more than a third of America was watching Granny tangle with Mr. Drysdale. In later years, when...