Word: sisyphean
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Venezuela--and that may have killed as many as 30,000 people--were an all too foreseeable tragedy. Millions of people inhabit Caracas' ranchos, the squalid shantytowns that cling to both sides of the 6,000-ft. mountains ringing the capital. And for decades those people have fought a Sisyphean battle to keep their rickety tin, cardboard and clay-block houses from tumbling down the washed-out slopes during heavy rains. Hundreds have died in past downpours, but as los ranchos kept swelling in size and population, it was only a matter of time before a deluge claimed thousands...
...even, strapped for cash, starting a beauty business at age 58. Such a life--one that has been copiously documented, by Colette and others--presents Judith Thurman, author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Knopf; 592 pages; $30), with both an embarrassment of riches and a Sisyphean task. Despite working on this book for nine years, Thurman, who won a National Book Award in 1983 for her biography of Isak Dinesen (and has been nominated again for this book), acknowledges that Colette remains an elusive figure, an author who hid herself in plain sight...
...Also, secretaries offices, unlike dorm rooms, were and are configured ergonomically. Before computers became office fixtures, secretaries had both a typing table and a writing desk, the former shorter than the latter so that typing didn t involve the praying mantis posture that Harvard desks necessitate. The Sisyphean struggle of the scrivener Nipper in Herman Melville s "Bartleby the Scrivener"-first tilting his writing table to angle of the "steep roof of a Dutch house" to ease his back, then lowering the table "to his waistbands" and stooping over when it stopped the circulation in his arms, then again tilting...
...trains were leaving two hours later. Hmmm. And then, like the final scene in >=The Usual Suspects,=wrong,=that clock is right,=it s a little fast/an hour/46 minutes off, we never changed it.<= And no big surprise, our VCRs are constantly blinking 12:00. Our Sisyphean car clock operates between nine and 11, treating us to an occasional accurate reading. While it seems easier to simply change our clocks, we resist...
...This trip is a Sisyphean climb for a diplomat, and the path is well-worn by her predecessors. Tomorrow Albright meets with Arafat, presumably to insist once again on a security crackdown. One can only hope she can charm him as easily as she does Jesse Helms...