Word: exhibitionistic
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Giggle at First. The British are famous for their toleration of eccentrics, but this can be intolerable to the eccentric himself if he is a dedicated exhibitionist. Bernard Kops has been a poor Jewish evacuee from the blitzed East End of London, a waiter, an actor in terrible road companies, a book peddler, a songwriter, a bum in London and Paris and tout for a brothel in Tangier. He has told all in a sort of breathless antistyle that can be the most irritating of all styles. Every frightful thing that happened to him (and the rare pleasant event...
...creates everything human the proposition that it is a distortion for a society to distinguish between sick and healthy, we arrive at his radical critique of culture. The prevailing ideas of society, he writes, rationalize the sickness of the majority while emphasizing the neuroses of the minority: "The exhibitionist is in the same class as all those other people labeled with the final 'ist,' the sadist, the masochist, the fetichist. They are in essence the same as ourselves, who call ourselves healthy; the sole difference is that we allow our desire to play only where custom permits, while...
...style, which according to Rhodes was "like that of Venetian glass, redundant and stuffed with reminiscences of Greek and Roman splendor. pseudo-Biblical, pseudomystical." A whole generation of Italian youth accepted his vision of life as an opera with bogus lyrics but real swords. Filippo Marinetti, founder and chief exhibitionist of the crackpot futurist cult (he later proposed kidnaping Pope Benedict XV in an airplane and dropping him into the Adriatic), hailed D'Annunzio as "the prodigious seducer, the ineffable descendant of Casanova and Cagliostro...
...doubt," says Rudolph, "that an ode ever got written to a flat-topped building in the sunset." Graduating with top honors from Harvard after a tour in the U.S. Navy (officer-in-charge, ship construction, Brooklyn Navy Yard), Rudolph was impatient for fame, admits he became a "structural exhibitionist." For instance, he put a fancy catenary roof on a 20-ft. Florida guesthouse: "It should have been used on a building with a 300-ft. span, but I just couldn't wait...
...Still smiling, she nodded.) Q. What else do you do besides sing and act? A. Counsel the lovelorn. Q. Why do you specialize so much in love? A. Because it is the only important thing. Q. Do you plan to write your memoirs? A. No, I am not an exhibitionist. Q. What do you fear most? A. Death...