Word: tottering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Leonardo in Rome) painted Ovid's story of the gods' revenge on the rebellious earth giants. These bearded, stumbling palookas in their peasants' breeches, crushed by the fall of rocks and masonry, are done with literally colossal gusto. The whole windowless chamber seems ready, for a moment, to totter and fall on your head. No room in Italy gives you a clearer sense of the mannerist delight in bizarre illusion. If one could imagine a halfway point between Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes and the gee-whiz delights of Walt Disney, this would...
...earthquake rides on a principle of disintegration -- the disintegration not only of architecture and pavements and lives but also of the entire idea of order, of process and human control. "What can one believe quite safe," asked Seneca, "if the world itself is shaken, and its most solid parts totter to their fall . . . and the earth lose its chief characteristic, stability?" The familiar world goes rioting down to rubble. Reality comes to rest at a crazy angle...
After a purging crack-up, Judith is able to throw away all her crutches -- booze, religion, romantic fantasies -- and totter off into Celtic twilight under her own renewed power. Director Jack Clayton (Room at the Top, The Great Gatsby) seems to think these mingy cliches speak volumes. With his smugly self-effacing camera style, he could use, as the Irish say, a "wee jar" to warm him up. His movie needs a big jar to warm up the viewer...
That's why even (or especially) diehard Sox fans viewing this year's pennant race totter in the volatile area between grim cynicism and disbelieving joy as the BoSox strengthen their hold on baseball's strongest division. Trusting a team that's hurt you is difficult. Boston fans should know not to excite themselves over silly little 13-game leads, like the one the Sox blew eight years...
South Florida are poor. Inspired by the Nicaraguans who fled their country after the downfall of President Anastasio Somoza in 1979, wealthy families from El Salvador, Guatemala, Venezuela and Argentina are nervously preparing a South Florida refuge in case their own governments totter. They are pouring their fortunes into Miami banks; it is estimated that as much as $4 billion in Latin exile money is socked away in Miami...