Word: barroom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dwight Macdonald, the bearded literary critic, was aghast at the barroom bathos, but failed to argue Mailer off the platform. Macdonald eventually squeezed in the valorous observation that Ho Chi Minh was really no better than Dean Rusk. After more obscenities, Mailer introduced Poet Robert Lowell, who got annoyed at requests to speak louder. "I'll bellow, but it won't do any good," he said, and proceeded to read from Lord Weary's Castle. By the time the action shifted to the Pentagon, Mailer was perky enough to get himself arrested by two marshals. "I transgressed...
Through the week, Adam kept up his high spirits. He led barroom hymn sessions, kidded with reporters, took dockside strolls to survey Bimini's natural resources ("Is that all you? he asked one girl in a tight sweater who sauntered past). There was at least some good news to justify his buoyant mood. Exclusion made him eligible for a $15,000 pension-half his regular congressional salary. Better yet, the New York Court of Appeals, highest in the state, lopped $100,000 off the outstanding libel judgment against him and ordered a lower court to reconsider another part...
...lifetime in America and gone back to Ireland-to a rest home, cruelly enough. The occupants are in their anecdotage, but none more so than Cass. With her sandpiper walk and her sandpaper voice, Ruth Gordon jigs and jaws through meandering monologues evenly divided between past loves and barroom drolleries...
...Woyzeck's friend Andres work in their parts more out of physical presence than anything else. Mayer has, on occasion, underdirected his actors: Nagin seems to be playing more to himself than to Babe, and James Shuman's monologue sounds more like an exercise in dialogue modulation than the barroom philosophy it should...
...nonsense, of course. But there are worse literary crimes than that. Clavell's book can claim kinship to those wonderful lithographs of the Battle of the Little Bighorn that once decorated every barroom. It isn't art and it isn't truth. But its very energy and scope command...