Word: despairingly
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...OBJECTIVE STATEMENT Mitchell makes most prominent is suburban dreariness. Several songs are explicit narratives of that dish-water despair, there's-no-olive-in-my-martini madness. In "Harry's House/Centerpiece" Mitchell interposes a jazzy arrangement of a 1950s love tune, "Baby, you're my centerpiece," with a desolate vision...
Most of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, however, is not so clearly defined. Joni Mitchell's despair and cynicism about surburbia, her alluding images, are too easily missed--the words trip over each other and get lost. She rarely succeeds at complementing lyrics with music. The bouncy conga rhythms are often too swift a vehicle for the words; and the synthesizer-chorale approach she takes to the more philosophical poems only makes them pretentious or droning...
...marriage is subject to constant strain. John Adams feels bound to comply with the orders of the new government, even though it means putting thousands of miles between him and his beloved Abigail. She complains he doesn't write enough, presses him to return and often seems close to despair. Months pass before letters cross the Atlantic: some are lost and some are destroyed. And there is her husband's constant fear that one will fall into the hands of the British and be used as propaganda, which leads him to caution her to censor what she writes. Yet throughout...
...this Miss Lonelyhearts succeeds in evoking the supreme negativity of West's vision, Teichmann's occasional soppiness notwithstanding. Because of the peculiar balance of this production, however, we don't even need to wait for the final curtain to experience the onset of despair. When Shrike, shrill as the song of the bird he's named for, tells Miss Lonelyhearts to "Get off this milk of human kindness bit," we wish the misguided kid would take his advice...
...THIS DESPAIR that makes Look How the Fish Live so powerful. When every story leaves the reader feeling empty and bemused, it's hard to go on to read the next. Powers offers very little hope--the major character of each story slips quietly into resignation, accepting a society that negates faith and community. One of Powers's pastors, who tries hard to gain the acceptance of his curate and his (curate's) friends, holds forth as he feels a true father would. He fails to establish any kind of relationship, but in the course of his attempt he realizes...