Word: demonism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Villagers prevailed upon construction workers to stop work until the dragon had been propitiated. Taoist priests were brought in to exorcise the demon. A member of the Man family predicted a "bloodbath" if government officials did not meet the village's demands. These included payment of thousands of dollars in expenses for exorcism and for hospitalization of stricken members of the Man family. For good measure, villagers mixed in a shakedown with their superstitions and demanded that the government construct a new drainage system and sidewalks for the village...
...mind keeps playing all these little jokes on his lovers. When the professor kisses, deft quotes seem to materialize like subtitles on a screen. Harrumphs of academic self-approval seem to plonk into the nearest pillow as narcissistic asides. No matter how Stern tries to turn loose the Merriwether demon, it insists on fixing its tie, unwildly holding doors open, and speaking with a broad...
...been encumbered with such longings the barnyard vitality of early Disney would have been lost. When fine-art quotes appear in Disney's films, they are either apocalyptic and expressionist or else genteel: little in between. Their storehouse is, of course, Fantasia (1940). The cold crags and demon-infested clouds of the Night on Bald Mountain sequence refer straight back to the hellscapes of late-medieval religious art. Like many another image in Fantasia, it is also filtered through Art Deco, the popular style of the '30s. Using Deco idioms was as far as Disney ever went...
...clues to what makes Bobby run. Whole libraries could be filled with psychiatric studies of ministers' sons as rips and rakehells, and Bobby belongs among them. The son of a preacher of the Church of Christ, Bobby grew up in a house that was never cursed by demon rum or cards. Four older brothers had him running races, pitching baseballs, jumping fences and swinging from trees, usually against neighborhood boys his age, with a Saturday matinee held out as a reward. Says Riggs: "Everything was a contest, everything was a game, and I never lost that early drive...
...SECOND half of his book the author adopts a variety of personae, from Orpheus to Luther to Satan himself, to demonstrate both the range and limitations of dialectical argument. In a mock soliloquy titled "Shorthand Transcript of a Metaphysical Press Conference Given by the Demon in Warsaw, on 20th December 1963," Kolakowski impersonates Satan in a remarkable exhibition of incontestable sophistry; he argues for his own existence in a discredulous age along the lines that his very strength lies in the fact that he does not exist. In other soliloquies, notably in one given by Abelard's Heloise in defense...