Word: fixedly
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...speculators can drive the price up or down almost at will. And there is always the danger that in the ensuing monetary turmoil, some government will conclude that its currency is floating to an unrealistically high or low level and allow its central bank to intervene to try to fix the price. In that case, the whole jerry-built system could come apart, and deliberate crafting of a new international monetary system designed to be permanent would become a more urgent world priority than ever. For the moment, though, currency values have proved able to float relatively smoothly on stormy...
...most telling of these incidents is Malle's view of a group of mechanics trying to fix a flat tire. Ten of them jump on and off the tire trying to fit it to a rim that is too large. They don't understand that technology will not allow certain possibilities. Similarly, at the site of a derailed train Malle highlights another strange mixture of men and machines; dozens of workmen pile rocks under the wheels, forming a ramp for the train to move onto the track...
...began to use heroin to unlock the doors of creativity the way Coleridge used opium and Schiller inhaled rotten apples. Finally he lost the trick of living off the top. "Do as I say and not as I do," he admonished Trumpeter Red Rodney as he gave himself a fix. He went into a steady decline. Though his records made millions, his last years were a hell of scrounging for drugs. He had a nervous breakdown, recovered, attempted suicide. In the end his body proved less durable than his music. Afflicted by cirrhosis of the liver, stomach ulcers and pneumonia...
...unlikeable schlemihl, except for his occasional self-denigrating humor. The problem Van Buren gives him is a variation on a dusty science fiction device-he finds he can stop time at will for everyone in the world but himself. As far as the chapter goes, the time-fix is more a pivot for the neuroses of a neatly conceived anti-hero than any kind of crucial element itself, and the combination works well in an unpretentious way-well-enough that it seems too bad you can't start reading the second chapter when this one ends...
...battle what Chandler called "the shadow line," his adversaries the people who walk it. In his present incarnation (Elliott Gould), Marlowe becomes a chain-smoking shlemiel. Gould looks less like a private eye than like a junkie half on the nod slouching along Sunset Strip looking for a fix. The only dope here is Marlowe himself. He stumbles into a job of playing wet nurse to an alcoholic fount of bestsellers (Sterling Hayden) whose ice-maiden wife (Nina Van Pallandt, late of the Clifford Irving/Howard Hughes headlines) plays at being concerned about his welfare...