Word: confounding
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...Adventurers' international-jet-set subjects would confound a Zola. In the hands of Robbins they become like the projections of CinemaScope: highly colored, nine times larger than life, and relentlessly two-dimensional. One of the projections is Diogenes ("Dax") Xenos, diplomat, soldier, businessman, patriot, politician, international satyr and unintentional satire. Dax is to women what Dash is to washing machines: he makes them feel ten feet tall. His sometime pals, a French playboy and a White Russian con man, are not far behind in their technique: one of them receives a gold cigarette case from a female admirer inscribed...
...Most of the pieces in the Advocate do not heighten or clarify what they talk about, nor do they entertain. They either grab the reader by the intellect and dare him to interpret them, or they flirt ambiguously with him. Too often the Advocate's authors "confound obscurity of expression with the expression of obscurity," as Poe put it. A good poem should sound good the first time around -- but it's entirely possible to slide through this whole magazine without being moved or interested enough by anything to want to understand it. If an Advocate writer stands silent...
Manhattan Art Dealer Leo Castelli is one of the biggest boosters of pop art. As if to confound critics who are proclaiming that the boom is already a bust, Castelli in the past fortnight has managed to sell the world's largest pop painting, by James Rosenquist, and exhibited the world's noisiest contempo rary sculpture, by Robert Rauschenberg. What do the two have to do with each other? To hear the artists tell it, both are simply expressions of today's urban landscape...
...crucial moment. On a scorching June day in 1778, Major General Charles Lee had ordered the Continental army to retreat before the redcoats. Then, in the nick of time, Washington, accompanied by a cockaded Alexander Hamilton and a bareheaded Marquis de Lafayette, gallops up to rally the troops and confound the crestfallen poltroon Lee,* slumping in his saddle. History records a piqued Washington demanding in Olympian tones: "I desire to know, sir, what is the reason, whence arises this disorder and confusion...
...Biology Club, not through any interest in biology, though my brother, a character at DeWitt Clinton High School, had told me what it meant, but because being a Biology Club opened the delightful prospect of carving the date on a park bench followed by the letters B.C., to confound future archaeologists...