Word: bookishness
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...suicide was 21-year-old Ian Palach, a quiet, bookish philosophy major at Charles University. Entering Wenceslas Square in the bustle of mid-afternoon traffic, Palach carefully removed his overcoat, poured a small can of gasoline over himself and struck a match. Instantly, to the horror of several dozen passersby, he turned into a human torch. Despite a bus dispatcher's frantic effort to smother the flames with his overcoat, Palach's body was ravaged. He died three days later...
...child, Burt was thin, withdrawn and bookish. His father took the family all over the world-Hawaii, Brazil, France, Japan-as he climbed the ladder of a large chemical company. Three years ago, when Burt was 15, the family moved to Palos Verdes, an affluent suburb south of Los Angeles. Almost overnight the youngster was transformed. He taught himself to surf, put on 50 Ibs. of muscle and a deep tan, was elected to the student council and began dating the prettiest girls. Though his grades slipped to the low B range, his parents were delighted...
...John Cassavetes) are delighted to find an apartment in the Branford, a penumbral old fortress of an apartment house on Manhattan's Central Park West, modeled on the real-life Dakota at 1 West 72nd Street (where some of the exterior scenes were shot). Rosemary's bookish old father figure, Hutch (Maurice Evans), is not too pleased; the Branford, he notes, has an unsavory history of suicides and diabolical doings, including the murder of a notorious Satanist...
...then Dylan's mind is always popping with the same kind of surreal and often religious imagery that he strings together in his songs. And his desire to find out only what's true and his rabid hate for cant are sincere. The message is that Dylan's a bookish intellectual who thinks to melodies and casts his ideas in scenes. The message is that Dylan is great media because he writes songs as his natural outlet of expression about things he's thinking about because of the way he lives...
Educated in Geneva and Spain, Borges, as John Barth notes, "seems to have read almost everything." His lectures and writings are scholarly without being bookish. (He deprecates "Cyclical Light," an early poem, as "priggish." "Of course I was young when I wrote it. I had to work in all those Greek names.") The broad background frames but never inhibits his intelligent, singular and personal world. Robert Lowell, introducing the fantast at a reading Wednesday night, called Borges' work amid that of other writers "always an oasis in a sea of competence...