Word: canting
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...projected titles, and other devices, Brecht's content is often so potent that we are sucked up willy-nilly--as in Mother Courage and Galileo. Similarly, Our Town, despite its lack of verisimilitude, rarely falls to sweep us up into the lives of its simple characters; and anyone who cant sit through its (somewhat too short) final act with dry eyes is nobody I should care to know...
...proclaiming the supremacy of the nation-state. Her real visions, then, are of the dawn of the age of democracy, and her real voice is the vox populi. She is, to Shaw, a saint of the downtrodden masses. And in the course of the play, she spouts enough demagogic cant about the rights of the individual to run for office herself...
...wears out every broadcast hour, she inspires more -and infinitely richer-fantasies than all the plastics of Disneyland. Indeed, it is barely possible that Cher in Cher may -with a little help from the many shrewd friends who so elaborately package her each week-redefine that grand old American cant phrase, "family entertainment." For if her style is at odds with that of the competition, the fact remains that like everyone who aspires to success when all of America is still awake, she must offer a little something for every member of the family. What is different about Cher...
What do Macdonald's windmills have in common as the tiller sees them? Humbug. Cant. The special form of dishonesty that betrays itself as lack of style. Irving Howe once complained that if Jesus were to deliver the Sermon on the Mount tomorrow, "Dwight Macdonald would write that while 'Mr. Christ makes some telling points' they suffer from syntactical confusion and 'a woolly, pretentious style.' " Macdonald's answer: "Were the Sermon woolly," that would be "my reaction, and I should be right, since in that case the Sermon would not be the great moral...
...some ways this is the customary Murdoch blend of incipient farce, domestic tragicomedy and intellectual soap opera. Baroque pratfalls occur as usual, but neither the release of laughter nor the expected snicker of superiority (what odd and frightful people!) follows. Blaise knows that his psychological theorizing is mostly cant, yet he does have a knack for helping his patients. His visits to sharp-tongued Emily's apartment are mixed blessings-it is a hate nest in which the girl spends a good deal of time demanding money to have her teeth fixed. Harriet at first seems too kind...