Word: ax
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...undertones of anti- Semitism, and his work was being subjected to the annihilating silence of suppression. So he composed "The End of a Beautiful Era," a poignant elegy on past illusions with a mordant conclusion about the future: "For the innocent head there is nothing in store but an ax/ and the evergreen laurel." Last week the eerie prophecy in these lines was fulfilled. Joseph Brodsky, 47, involuntarily cut off from his homeland in 1972, was given the Nobel Prize for Literature...
...life. In an agitated, high-pitched voice that could pierce the din of the loudest bar, he takes off after everything from convenience stores (where "$20,000 worth of cameras protect $20 worth of Twinkies") to slasher movies ("Woman opens the refrigerator, gets hit in the face with an ax. There's a common household accident, huh?"). Leno's P.G.-rated material is witty, accessible and firmly anchored in bedrock middle America. "I'm hopelessly American," he confesses. "If something doesn't come in a Styrofoam box with a lid on it, I'm lost...
...devoted fan and a merciless editor can each make harsh demands on a writer. For Novelist Paul Sheldon, Stephen King's protagonist, both are lumped together in Annie Wilkes, "a woman full of tornadoes waiting to happen." Trapped in Annie's house, Sheldon finds her a skilled practitioner with ax and carving knife who wants to cut his body as well as his prose. He is forced to write, just for her, another in his series featuring Misery Chastain, darling of supermarket bookracks. At first playing Scheherazade to her, he ends up playing Scheherazade to himself: he will...
...crime was so stunningly brutal that the years have done little to calm public outrage. Lawrence Singleton, 59, was convicted in 1979 of kidnaping and raping a 15-year-old hitchhiker, then chopping off her forearms with an ax. He left her to die in a culvert beside a rural Northern California road. But the girl survived the attack, managed to seek out assistance and later helped convict her tormentor. When Singleton was paroled two weeks ago, after serving nearly eight years of a 14-year, four-month sentence, local officials across the state took court action to ensure that...
...this way," said Corbin Wyant, the publisher-trombonist. "I don't think you could raise a family, plan retirement, those things. One of the best trombonists I've ever known now sells tools. It's really sad. He played with Stan Kenton." A moment later Wyant brought his own ax to bear on Kenton's wonderful Peanut Vendor...