Word: browed
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Scalia's objections to set asides and preferential treatment run deep. "My father came to this country when he was a teenager," he once wrote. "Not only had he never profited from the sweat of any black man's brow, I don't think he had ever seen a black man." The only child of an Italian-immigrant father who became a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College and of an Italian-American mother who taught public school, Scalia remains determinedly anti-elitist--he dines in a downtown pizza joint and keeps his name listed in the phone book...
...Dole does not win the Republican nomination, he will die a horrible political death. We will see him vainly thrashing around in his last strongholds--the Bible Belt and the isolated pockets of the country where fundamentalism and fanaticism still rear their low brow heads. At campaign rallies, prayer breakfasts and fund raising dinners, he will constantly draw attention to his gnarled fist, until even his most ardent supporters desert him, disgusted by his shameless antics...
...three thirty in the morning before the commanding presence of an ancient pagan god stood sohdly on the ground, its nose perfectly chiselled and its heavy-set brow looming over the small men at its feet. The Faster Island god, weighing in at around the mass of a small car, was encased in ice and anchored to the ground. Cries of victory and epiphany flooded the night air and the creators, about half a dozen of them, sat on the ground and looked up in exhausted awe. The thing they created was greater than any of them...
...obstetrician clipping a baby's navel cord..." But at other moments Davis lapses into tiresome literary tics, for example, the Amazing, All-In-One Speech Formula: within a few pages, we see people pleading, muttering, snapping, intervening, erupting, venturing, uttering in horror (a personal favorite), inserting furrowing brow in non-comprehension, half-gasping, rebutting, speaking sotto voce (a diving officer, no less), barking, snorting, and chirping...
Durang doesn't try to rationalize the paradoxes of his work, which can be at once high-brow and happily vulgar, at once a send-up of the literary canon and an addition to that canon. He acknowledges, too, that there is a double edge to his satire of societal institutions, a vilification belying a genuine disappointment in their failures. The measly contradictions of his plays, says Durang, come naturally and reflect the impulsiveness of his creative process. "I start off with the rules to a particular universe, which are really crack-pot. I just sort of expect people...