Word: barnumism
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...accused Allen of misusing the funds himself, but he is being held responsible for a variety of other sins. "Dwight is an operator, a wheeler-dealer," says Professor Robert Wellman. "But he is a very poor administrator." Adds Professor Albert Anthony: "He's a P.T. Barnum type. He knew damn well he couldn't make the school rank in the top two or three in a few years by scholarly rigor. So he went into all of the innovations that were hot in the late '60s -all the things that were the beneficiaries of federal money...
...event. It's all about a man who lives somewhere to the north of Cambridge going into Boston and getting drunk, thus causing all sorts of problems for himself. There's a moral here somewhere, but it's probably gotten lost over the past 131 years. P.T. Barnum used to lead temperance parades to performances of this, and you know what Barnum said, sucker. People put shows like this on because they are great...
...Fields of Force the symptoms are recalled with an intelligence that, like the champion's, has little room for compassion. Fischer's unstable personality, a fusion of Garbo and Barnum, is examined in all its two dimensions. The aging Wunderkind remains a prodigy, perhaps the most powerful grand master the world has ever witnessed. But from the opening gambit it is obvious that the author's affections are with Boris Spassky...
...event. It's all about a man who lives somewhere to the north of Cambridge going into Boston and getting drunk, thus causing all sorts of problems for himself. There's a moral here somewhere, but it's probably gotten lost over the past 131 years. P.T. Barnum used to lead temperance parades to performances of this, and you know what Barnum said, sucker. People put shows like this on because they are great...
Circus tells a tale that could happen only in America. A circus, under the direction of an apparently ageless Chinese named Dr. Lao, arrives one day in the town of Abalone, Ariz., and delivers delights that even Barnum would have hedged at promising. "The world is my idea," says Dr. Lao. "As such I present it to you." The circus, a metaphor for his world, is half dream, half nightmare. In its sideshow tents a puritanical schoolteacher is seduced by a syrinx-playing satyr, a gorgon turns an unbelieving harridan into "carnelian chalcedony," one of the harder varieties of building...