Word: faintness
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...braggadocio, the same sort of elaborate but inglorious combats one finds here. Heroics are mocked, survival is championed. The musketeers are made into creatures whose absurdities of conduct, florid codes of honor and hollow protestations of heroism make them all the more recognizable and human. It is their own faint absurdity that makes them true...
Grace Paley is a difficult and subtle writer. Her strengths are a peculiar quality and modulation of tone, and an ability to find the telling phrase--even her titles bear their own special attraction. Her sentences are dipped in a faint, pastel irony. Her narrators are people in the process of responding deeply, immediately, and with a fascinating restraint that molds it all into words. The hearts of her stories are less plots than the tense tracing of forces in some encounter--an encounter of people, passions, sensibilities...
...even keel is projecting faint disgust at everyone and everything in every movie; he even breathes half-sarcastically, jaded beyond belief. Here it's not a world-wise jaded: the landscape of his face is as dissipated as the roads and stations--all blear, stare, and past-drunk. This is the heavy-lidded look of a Robert Mitchum, except that his moves are quicker: he's dead and jaunty at the same time. The adroitness comes from doing everything with ceremony: never has anyone ever used a napkin with more style, only the style is devilish and cynical...
...When watching The Exorcist, I was sure that God, too, felt bemused, and the Devil was laughing his head off. The audience I saw giggled and laughed when it was supposed to faint and vomit...
...final buzzer had sounded and the fans began to file out to the subways. (That is, the Harvard fans began to file out. Most of the faint-hearted Eagle supporters had opted to leave earlier in the period.) The Grimy Garden emptied, but the Harvard band played on...all the way to Harvard Square...