Word: substratum
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...first chapter, which takes place years after they have graduated high school, the Swede, who wants help writing a memoir about his recently deceased father, invites the elderly Zuckerman to dinner. Zuckerman is captivated by the opportunity to explore what he dubs “the substratum,” his term for the deep and authentic life of the mind. This quest for the profound proves devastating as the Swede only discusses the happy, superficial lives of his family and does not even mention grieving for his father. During the dinner scene, Roth juxtaposes paragraphs in which the Swede...
Philosophers call it the “substratum,” and chefs call it “umami,” but the universal word for it is “subtlety.” It’s that Mona-Lisa-smile component that separates the merely good from the eternally memorable. Thousands of people have tried to describe it, but to little—if any—avail. And so the movie “The Burning Plain,” written and directed by the Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, is the latest work to remind...
...There has been a rowdy, adolescent substratum to the Party of Grownups ever since Ronald Reagan renovated the property, inviting America's blue collars and rednecks to join the white-shoed country clubbers. And the party's current despond seemed to enhance the rowdiness in Ames. It was hard to find a happy Republican. "I don't like the three top guys," Howard Taylor, a community-college teacher from Milo told me, referring to Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain. "They don't have Midwestern values." Nor did Taylor like George W. Bush so much anymore. "I think...
...There was also a healthy substratum of what were called avant-garde movies, shown at college film societies and, in New York, at Amos Vogel's pioneering Cinema 16 film club. Oh yes, it was instructive and ennobling, watching the elliptical 16mm films that some of us thought would take cinema into the post-narrative age and make it a truly modernist art. We also had to admit that movies like Bruce Conner's Cosmic Ray (a naked woman dances to a Ray Charles song) and Stan Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving (birth, in gynecological closeup) were also, relatively...
...involves both celebrities and fashion - the use of animals in scientific research is acquiring a higher profile in the ethical battle for the hearts and minds of policymakers and public alike. Many within the movement apply relentless pressure to stockholders, suppliers and other business contacts, and some - a small substratum - believe that a proper response to violence against animals is violence against humans. Much of their fury has been directed at the occupants of a sprawling, quiet compound that sits behind black iron gates and a fence topped with coiled razor wire near the Cambridgeshire village of Alconbury. Inside...