Word: childhoods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...second warrant was for John Arthur Spenkelink, a moody loner who had been in and out of jail since childhood. Spenkelink's troubles began early; at twelve he discovered the body of his alcoholic father, who had committed suicide in the front seat of his truck in Buena Park, Calif. Two years later, Spenkelink was arrested for the first time, for driving a stolen car. There followed arrests for disturbing the peace, for burglary and for armed robbery. Stints in reform schools were to no avail. When he married briefly at 18, his probation officer could find only...
Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard. You probably have to be born serious, or at least go through a very interesting childhood. Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared to adults as a class...
Adults, on the whole, are solemn. The transition from seriousness to solemnity occurs in adolescence, a period in which nature, for reasons of her own, plunges people into foolish frivolity. During this period the organism struggles to regain dignity by recovering childhood's genius for seriousness. It is usually a hopeless cause...
...natural function, to be sure, says Stoller, but it is dominated by painful undercurrents from the past. Sex fantasies are not idle daydreams but carefully coded scripts by which the inner mind seeks to work out lingering problems from childhood. These scripts help determine whom the adult will be attracted to, how the sexual partner will be dealt with, and even what sexual positions are likely to be preferred. "Sexual excitement depends on a scenario," says Stoller. "The person to be aroused is the 'writer,' who has been at work on the story line since childhood." The writer...
...When I perform, it's very personal," Kaufman says. "I'm sharing things I like, inviting the audience into my room." He means this literally. The Mighty Mouse record he sings along to is his own, from childhood; the cartoons he shows-including a couple of kindergarten antiprejudice tracts-were long-ago gifts from his grandfather. "The audience," says his collaborator Bob Zmuda, 29, "is asked to become babies again." This is a sort of low-level exercise in primal manipulation that might turn precious, like a Steve Martin extravaganza of silliness. But Kaufman, whether he chooses...