Word: gloom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...commuter station. In 1969 the last train left, and the place was abandoned: a rusting abode of cats and pigeons, whose damp silence was occasionally broken by film units; Orson Welles and Bernardo Bertolucci are among the directors who have sought evocative locations in its Piranesian gloom. Meanwhile developers covetously eyed it, dreaming of the slow-motion arc of the wrecker's ball. In 1971 the French government, under President Georges Pompidou, issued a demolition order...
Mailer, 63, is in his element in more ways than one. Based on his best- selling 1984 novel, Tough Guys Don't Dance, the film is set in the autumnal gloom of the Cape Cod resort that he has frequented for years. In fact, aptly enough, the director's brick-faced home has been taken over to serve as the onscreen abode of his protagonist Tim Madden, a onetime boxer and womanizing writer who wakes up one morning with a case of alcoholic amnesia and the vague apprehension that he may have killed his wife. Due for release next fall...
Darkness descended quickly from the cloudy autumn skies. Most of the crowd couldn't see Harvard's last play--a Hail Mary pass to the corner of the endzone--because of the gloom that had engulfed the Stadium...
Indeed, there is more than enough gloom to go around these tales. Dubus, 50, has always written most effectively about loners and losers, people who, as the narrator of one story describes them, "move through life like scraps of paper in the wind." The tension in his stories springs from an ambivalent attitude toward such characters. Are they victims of circumstance or of their own inadequacies...
...coasts. The authors of The Bi-Coastal Economy managed to make it look that way only by excluding from the ranks of "coastal" states timber- producing Washington and Oregon and steel-dependent Pennsylvania (which lacks a coastline but is considered part of the Mid-Atlantic region). Nor is all gloom in the heartland. Michigan, one of the most depressed states a few years ago, has achieved a remarkable turnaround, thanks to heavy spending by the auto companies to battle import competition and successful efforts to attract electronics and other high-tech industries...