Word: damoclean
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...Name Is Joe basically traces the implicitly painful and Damoclean progress of the recovering alcoholic. It's not like there are regular scenes of stare-offs with bottles, or moments of temptation and ultimate white-knuckled resolve in front of seedy liquor stores next to check cash-ins. Loach instead wisely lets Joe's successes speak for themselves, their very modesty giving them a fragility; at one point Joe's safe wallpapering gig almost spins into disaster when a welfare agent snaps telephoto pics to expose his outside earnings (Joe paints the agent's car). Mullen's performance is ultranaturalistic...
...chronology is important because it helps explain the shallow intimacy of most of the book. Not until the end does she come to grips with her capacity for denial and deception. The earlier parts are filled with foamy self- analysis. "I lived under a Damoclean sword of accusation," she writes of her childhood, "and at any given moment it could drop and cut off, if not my head, my confidence." During the primaries, she says, "I couldn't measure up, so I measured out the booze. My low opinion of myself reached a new high...
...loan of the cabin site at Walden Pond and such genteel activities as frequent walks into Concord for civilized conversation and home cooking. H.D.T. had it both ways, which is more than can be said for the nature he wrote about. The shadow of the surveyor and his Damoclean plumb bob had already fallen across the land. The future held a ring of bright beer cans...
knew all too well that the Soviet Union had long had the U.S.. under the Damoclean sword of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the Russian homeland. There thus seemed little real need for such a massive effort in Cuba. Yet, as Kennedy pondered and as he talked long and earnestly with his top Kremlinologists-among them former U.S. Ambassadors to Moscow Llewellyn Thompson and Charles Bohlen-some of the answers began to emerge. More and more in Kennedy's mind, the Cuban crisis became linked with impending crisis in Berlin-and with an all-out Khrushchev effort to upset...
David Hays '52 has designed some fitting modernistic settings. He clearly indicates the shifts of locale between Bohemia and Sicilia by suspending representations of two different suns overhead, with a Damoclean sword for the trial scene and a double font for the final reconciliation scene. The sheep-shearing festival, with the whole stage and its inhabitants bathed in garlands, is a delight to the eye. Marc Blitzstein has composed rather modern music--appropriately dissonant or consonant as the situation warrants. The backstage instrumentalists are not yet wholly at ease in their parts, but a few more performances will fix that...