Word: frantic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...counterpunch lines. "You are considered an underdeveloped nation by underdeveloped nations," the Local Prince is told by the Columnist. "Disneyland-that's our code name for Washington," explains the Ambassador. Political in-joking is the sport of the evening, but some of it has a kind of frantic blandness about it: "Do you realize that the average age of Chiang Kai-shek's privates...
...inevitability lights a fire beneath the "search" that all of us, in one form or another, have undertaken. We want something to show for our 75. or whatever, years when they are behind us. The Supermarket Racer option has shown its bankruptcy in the pathetic forms of frantic, dawn-to-dusk errand-running P.T.A. mothers and ulcer-ridden financier uncles. The search has brought some of us to Harvard and is beginning to turn many of us away from it. It has fostered acidheads, Weathermen, Krishna- consciousness chanters, junkies...
...none is half so painful as Paris 7000 (ABC), featuring George Hamilton as a trouble shooter at the U.S. embassy. George is all that remains of the most expensive (original budget: nearly $8,000,000) debacle in TV history, The Survivors. The series was glued together in the frantic eight weeks since ABC gave up on the original program. George professes to believe that in Paris 7000 there is "more of the real me," which is to say the patina beneath the suntan of a man who after eleven years in acting still has only two expressions-a saturnine scowl...
...Frantic and Languid. Armah's fiction is stiller and clearer. His second novel, Fragments, is set at a lower voltage than The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, his first novel about the failure of revolution to inspirit his fellow Ghanaians. But contempt for his countrymen still seethes, this time because they are corruptly devoted to cars, tape recorders and neon "WELLCOME" signs at airports. Baako, his fragile hero, cannot adjust to such trinket worship. His sister's premature baby dies when the family too quickly presents it at an outdoor festival because they are anxious...
Oppressed by such signs of avarice, Baako's mind cracks in a long, brilliant scene that is at once frantic and languid. Armah unwinds the entire story slowly, circling the fragments of Baako's breakdown with the sureness of an African tribal dance that seems always on the edge of monotony, yet is continually closing on the climax. For Baako, too, there is a circling. First he approaches nearer and nearer to a knowledge of what lies at his center of being. Then he is literally and figuratively encircled by others like a mad dog. In an Ibsenian...