Word: abyss
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...allies stood at the abyss of disaster. The Chinese Communists, pouring across the Manchurian border in vast formations, had smashed the U.N. army, this week were clawing forward to pursue and destroy its still-organized fragments. Caught in the desperate retreat were 140,000 American troops, the flower of the U.S. Army-almost the whole effective Army the U.S. had. With them, fighting to establish a defensive position, were 20,000 British, Turkish and other allies, some 100,000 South Korean soldiers...
...Review, British Scholar Geoffrey Grigson sets out to make a case for three such painters, all born in 1741: Henry Fuseli, John Henry Mortimer, and James Barry. "They share," Grigson says, "in the sense of turmoil, of the black and red river, of the black and cavernous and jagged abyss . . ." In plainer language, all three painted more or less high-toned horror pictures...
...tumultuous Hercules Slaying the Hydra, he drew such fantasies as an orchestra of flatulent beasts, which must have seemed capricious and vulgar to all but his best friends. Yet, says Grigson, Fuseli and Mortimer "drank to different depths out of the same brew and looked together into the abyss. Mortimer [like Fuseli] wildly, demoniacally, lit up, the eyes, accentuated them in shade, filled them with the gleam of interior flame and power...
...coat is too long," Grigson concludes, "and he can spare an inch or two for his now destitute forerunners." But Blake well deserves his long coat. Like a great artist, and unlike Fuseli, Mortimer and Barry, he pictured the heights with as much vision as he did the abyss...
...true Abner fan (classified by Capp as a "slobbering" fan) can forget the magnificent moment when J. Roaringham Fatback, the hog tycoon, ordered Onnecessary Mountain tilted sideways with enormous jacks to keep its shadow from falling on his breakfast egg. The hovels of Dogpatch naturally sailed off into the abyss below...