Word: coffin
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Aiken knows and understands himself, but no one else. The autobiographical character in each of his five novel emerges clearly from the "phantasmargoric world." But the author suffers from the plight of his central characters, such as the insane hero of King Coffin who flatly states, "It was true that no human being could ever achieve a real contact with anything or anyone." Aiken's characters are always distant and blurred for author, protagonist, and reader...
Although in Conversation this sort of temporary isolation saves a faltering marriage, Aiken points out that to isolate ourselves within the shell of the ego is no way to avoid pain. In King Coffin, Jasper Ammans, a young, insane intellectual who lives on Plympton Street in Cambridge, walls himself up within himself; he decides to kill a total stranger--"the final action by which he would have set the seal on his complete freedom." Ammans observes and analyzes his victim, Jones, so intensely that Jones' life, Jones' frustrations, Jones' pains become Ammans' own pain--and self-destruction. Involvement with others...
...same abstruse prolixity floods all of Aiken's novels. Their action is mostly interior: in Blue Voyage, a playwright broods upon and confirms his own sense of inferiority during a voyage to England; in King Coffin, a paranoid ponders a murder for a hundred pages and then decides not to commit...
Died. John H. ("Jack") Minds, 92, fullback on the 1894-97 Pennsylvania elevens that won 55 of 56 games, who against Harvard kicked football's first point after touchdown from placement, was the first to make an art of hiding the ball, the first to use the "coffin-corner" kick, became a Walter Camp All-American by scoring 15 touchdowns, two field goals, 27 extra points in 1897, a record that would be impressive even in today's high scoring game; in Philadelphia...
...father was a truck driver. He quit school at 15, joined the Royal Navy at 16, and was medically discharged at 19 for stomach ulcers. He bears two souvenirs of his Navy career tattooed on his forearm: "MUM AND DAD" and "SCOTLAND FOREVER." He worked at odd jobs like coffin polishing. Then a friend told him that a dancer was needed for the chorus of the London production of South Pacific. Connery took a fast 48 hours of private dancing lessons...