December 30, 1993

A man apparently angry at his girlfriend's relatives was arrested yesterday in connection with a series of bombings across upstate New York that killed five people within 90 minutes of each other on Tuesday evening. A second man, who the authorities said had bought dynamite and blasting caps and helped make the bombs, was also arrested. Law-enforcement officials said six bombs were delivered to relatives of the girlfriend, Brenda Lazore, who lives in the Rochester area.

To raise its investment in Viacom Inc.'s battle for Paramount Communications Inc., the Blockbuster Entertainment Company is said to be seeking a Viacom asset as well as better terms, several executives close to Blockbuster said yesterday. While it was unclear whether a revised deal between Viacom and its equity investor was imminent, many analysts said they expected Viacom's chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, to make another bid before Jan. 7. That is the deadline the Paramount board has set for Viacom to top the cash-and-stock offer from QVC Network Inc. that is now worth about $10 billion. Viacom needs $700 million more. So far, Blockbuster has invested $600 million in the deal.

Adding to his core staff, the Mayor-elect named two prominent campaign supporters to newly created posts as advisers. Page B3.

On these days of winter's first cold snap, Adam Alb eats garlic with his lunch, Jersey City firefighters carry "winter bags" on their trucks, Guenter Skammel lugs around a bucket of hot water on his feeding rounds at the aquarium on Coney Island, and Ron Ste-Marie clomps around an unheated recycling center in far northern New York State in boots that are better than antifreeze -- "good to 80 below," he says. For people who earn their living outdoors, the trick and the challenge in coping with temperatures in the teens and 20's and with snow in the air is keeping warm and avoiding frostbite while they tend zoo animals, work on cars, fight fires, police highways, teach skiing, plow snow, cut down trees or play football.

"I AM thrilled to the spine . . . and I feel as if I were going to get married -- to the right man at last!" Edith Wharton wrote to a friend about her delight in renovating a ruined fortress above the Mediterranean at Hyeres, France. And indeed she was to have her most prolific period in the 1920's -- while dividing her time between this Mediterranean retreat and a grand house, Pavillon Colombe, outside Paris. Both houses were more than just dwellings. They were constructions that mirrored some inner geography and had the power to release her creativity. From "The Age of Innocence" (1920) to "The Writing of Fiction" (1925) to "A Backward Glance" (1934), these settings provoked a torrent of fiction, criticism and memoir. Wharton's quest for the perfect house -- from Pencraig, her parents' "cottage" in Newport, R.I., to her own house, the Mount, in Lenox, Mass., to those two French locations where she spent the prolific years of her 50's and 60's -- is a reminder that writers' houses are hardly roofs against rain.