Some critics saw it as a withering and ultimately arid satire on affluent American aridness, an overextended variation on shorter, more surreal works like "The American Dream" and "The Sandbox".
Or he can invoke the oblique aridness of conceptual poetics: "baridi.
Most palpable is the queasy drift of Abby's ethics and the sense that her escape is a fragile, even illusory one, though that itself seems partly to result from the slight aridness of many of the film's sex scenes.
He chose the West in part because its aridness and lack of vegetation allow for an unobscured view of the changes caused by urbanization.
In "Maurice Ravel: A Life," he argues that Ravel's hidden homosexuality was central to his life and therefore to his art, that it explains both the aridness of his human relationships and the sensuality of his music.
That spring, however, with both her children off to college, she became increasingly aware of a certain aridness in her marriage and felt besieged by the demands of a new full-time job.
A GREAT ARIDNESS Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest.
Ari Phillips, who's pursuing a master's degree in global policy studies and journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, sent this fine Dot Earth Book Report after reading "A Great Aridness" in preparation for a two-month reporting trip this summer exploring energy use and climate change in the Southwest.
In the introduction to William deBuys' recent book "A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest," Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist who co-directs the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona, says: "Climate change will produce winners and losers, and those in the Southwest will be losers.
That prospect is the subject of two new books, "A Great Aridness," by William deBuys, a conservationist based in New Mexico, and "Bird on Fire," by Andrew Ross, a social scientist at New York University.
