As for Mr. Woetzel, 41, who recently received a master's degree in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, his current preoccupations include the Vail International Dance Festival in Colorado, where he has been the artistic director.
Tyson's artistic preoccupations include mathematical models, gambling, the operations of chance, and the systems, random or otherwise, governing human history.
The truth, however, is that early Prynne is quarried from all too real and resistant material: frequent preoccupations include capitalism and commodification, scientific method and research, cultural archaeology, glaciation and the problem of waste (a recent pamphlet is titled Refuse Collection).
But in some respects his report reiterates the military top brass's traditional preoccupations, including the urge to master new technologies such as nuclear energy (to power submarines, not make bombs) and create a domestic arms industry, and a mild paranoia about Amazonia.Brazil's army occupies an ambiguous place in national life.
That is partly because residents have other preoccupations, including poverty and tensions between black residents and the West Memphis Police Department.
Every presidential campaign crystallizes its candidate's personality, proclivities and preoccupations, including, four years ago, President Obama's "no drama" ethos and Senator John McCain's freewheeling "maverick" bid, which led to his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate.
The O-Factor has a number of preoccupations, including the fact "Brokeback Mountain" has switched to silent running for the homestretch of the Oscar hunt.
Preoccupations including comb-overs, stingy hosts, medical quacks, the poetry racket, the futility of cosmetics, consumptive heiresses and one-eyed women lend his books the ambience of a front-row seat at the Roman carnival.
With a narrative centered around revolution, terrorism and heroism, the series will embody the intersection of several of Coates's preoccupations, including a comic-books fandom that he has nursed since he was a child.
