Word: conning
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bebop monologues as part of his own prose style. Dean Moriarty, the hero and mobile savage of On the Road, is Neal Cassady right down to his pedal foot. "He was," wrote Kerouac early in the novel, "simply a youth tremendously excited with life; and though he was a con man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention...
This is the Neal Cassady that beckons from his widow's memoir 22 years after his death in Mexico at the age of 42. That he survives Carolyn Cassady's recollections with some of the legend intact suggests not only that a successful con man sells what people want to buy but also that he must believe in the pitch himself. For the author, who was an adventuresome graduate of Bennington when she met Cassady in 1947, this meant that life could be more exciting than settling down with a guy named Bill. With a guy named Neal...
...story, based on an actual incident, takes on deep resonances in Guare's fiction. It becomes a metaphor for liberals' fantasies of rescuing the poor. It confronts the ambivalence that the sane feel toward the mentally ill: when the con man, deftly played by James McDaniel, seems to reveal a pathological belief in his own fantasies, the wife, played by the ever splendid Stockard Channing, vacillates between compassion and revulsion. And the encounter devastatingly sketches the uneasy state of U.S. race relations, in which white liberals may endorse the black cause in theory, yet not know any blacks socially...
...electoral district where I was elected to the 28th Party Congress ((scheduled to take place this summer)). I told my listeners: If anyone says to you there are simple solutions to our problems, if anyone promises that such a thing exists, then that person is nothing but a con artist; he's out to deceive you. At such turning points in history, all sorts of people come forward in the political, economic and cultural arenas. Some are just a bit strange, while others are downright dangerous. It's important to know which kind you're dealing with. No one will...
...self-pity: Joe loves Kitty, goes to the lockup, survives the schemes of bad villains with the help of good villains, and gets out to find true-blue Kitty and the child he has never seen waiting for him. The best of the book is Morgan's wildly reinvented con lingo. His ear fails him occasionally, when he uses lace-curtain language -- "caparisoned," "implacable mien" -- that some editor should have yanked from the manuscript with tongs. But at other times he's cooking: "Saturday night movies in the Gym were the social climax of the week. Everyone...