Word: dismall
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...turns out, are a rogues' gallery of stupid, brutal and arrogant attendants. In self-defense the hero tries to decide who he is and what made him that way. A succession of sometimes awkward flashbacks shows a dismal flat in a dismal slum, a father dying of some unspeakable capitalist contagion, a mother playing around with her "fancy man," a burglary of no more importance than a raid on the cookie jar, a relentless agent of the law who brings the hero to what the picture plainly does not think is justice. In the end, given the chance...
Racing off into poetry and surrealist invocations of death and decay and loneliness, Janet Frame's story occasionally bogs down in unintelligibility, often seems tainted by abnormal morbidity. But as in her earlier books (Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water), she writes with power and makes the dismal fumblings of her creatures seem touching, compels the reader finally to accept as looming mountains the emotional molehills that are the topography of starved lives. Toby sustains a whole lifetime upon one moment of triumph: the time when his grammar school teacher read his paper on "The Lost Tribe...
...Soltikoff, a 40-1 long shot: the $231,000 Arc de Triomphe, France's richest horse race, run over Longchamps' egg-shaped 1½-mi. grass course. Finishing a dismal tenth was the U.S. Cinderella horse Carry Back, given what Owner Jack Price and other observers (including ex-Jockey Eddie Arcaro) called a "stupid" ride by Australia's Scobie Breasley. "Two hours before post time, Breasley was still in the dining room, having a hearty lunch and sipping champagne," said Price angrily. "At the eighth pole-where ,Carry Back usually makes his best run-it looked like...
...Connection. Opium is the religion of the people in this picture. As it begins eight heroin addicts are flobbing around a dismal flat in Manhattan, neither drunk nor asleep, neither dead nor alive. They lean against the walls, they stare with empty eyes. Sometimes they splutter obscenities at each other for no reason sometimes they babble mindlessly about themselves. They are waiting. Waiting to make The Connection, "waiting for The Cowboy to gallop in on a white horse...
...Tulsa, Okla., for the men; Mrs. Muriel Simbro of Van Nuys, Calif., for the women. The former champions were both Czechs. The U.S. women's team was a surprise winner of the women's team accuracy event, and the men's team, which finished a dismal fourth last time, was second only to Czechoslovakia. 6.440 points to 6,390. Russia finished third...