I had been tasked with offering an informed article on the current state of passion in the increasingly football-mad South on the heels of the plethora of distressing football-related news during the past year: Penn State, concussions, bounties, etc.
In 1997, I was conducting interviews as I prepared to write my novel "A State of Passion," which is about the banat ishreh — women who form intense, intimate relationships with other women and who meet in groups in order to sing, dance and socialize.
Hasn't Margaret Gray, who wrote the review of the musical "Bridges of Madison County" ["In a State of Passion," Dec. 14] ever heard of the words "spoiler alert"?
It's a fierce film; Schrader, one of the crucial creators of the modern cinema (among his many achievements, he wrote "Taxi Driver" and directed "American Gigolo"), seems to have made it in a state of anger, passion, pain, mourning, and desire, held together by the conflicted religious fury — blending exaltation and torment — that runs through all of his films.
It made me wonder how we get from that state of unbridled passion to tempered emotions.
Kahlo, who devoted her life to creating searing self-portraits that communicated her shifting states of pain, passion, isolation and ambition, was the clear choice. .
The ball communicates in every language, you get to see the locals in a rare state of openness and passion, and you meet the culture in its most convivial and gregarious mode, when it is most ready to include an outsider in its rites (so long as he's wearing the right colours).
Affects are defined as "passing deviations from the state of equanimity", whereas passions are "ingrained desires" (LPs [1850]: 76).
Can you imagine either of our political parties, in their current states, generating that kind of passion?
It was easier for him to look at my broke state and call it lack of passion or enthusiasm than to admit that he'd rather date a woman with the means to see New York as a playground rather than a test of survival skills.
It seems plausible to understand Hobbes not so much to be opposing two separate faculties, as distinguishing between the chaotic and unbridled passions of the state of nature and what emerges when passions are channeled by an overriding, organizing passion (fear of a coercive power) to accord with a common measure.
