Word: grasping
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...they accept a celluloid version of the swinging sixties. Now I have nothing against cheap legend, you understand; the prevalent romanticism of American narrative cinema provides a most captivating, not always inaccurate, cultural history of the U.S.A., sometimes useful as a frame of reference, always in our minds. Our grasp of the twenties and thirties cannot be divorced from icons remembered from countless gangster films and screwball comedies--anymore than we know the old west apart from the one given us by John Ford. These films are our memories of American life styles and geographies instinctively accessible although they existed...
Nonetheless, Humphrey is attacked as deficient in the very qualities that have distinguished his career. That explains, to a degree, the bewilderment that shows up in the pursed lips and clenched jaw. What he fails to grasp is that he is no longer Mayor Humphrey, or young Senator Humphrey, and has not been for many years. He constantly reminds people of the way he was, but he is that way no longer, and his frequent excursions into nostalgia only underscore the point...
...false rumor that he was an opium addict, and who married the madam of a Jacksonville sporting house, or at least lived with her. Lionized. In the 68 years since Crane's death, two biographies, a thinly disguised biographical novel, and scores of literary essays have tried to grasp the causes of his failure. This massive, prolix biography by Author Stallman, a literature professor at the University of Connecticut, comes as a refreshing if formidable change. Professor Stallman refuses to truckle to the notion that all things in heaven and earth are simply dreams in Freudian psychology and rejects...
Grand Tour in Space. Beyond this "minimal" program, the scientists say, there are other planetary opportunities that the U.S. should grasp. In 1973 and 1975, for example, the planets will be positioned so that a Mariner flying past Venus will be whipped by Venusian gravity into a trajectory that will carry it close to Mercury, affording man his first glimpse of the sun's nearest neighbor. And in 1977 and 1978, planetary positions will enable a spacecraft flying by Jupiter to take a gravity-boosted "grand tour" that will also take it on past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune...
...blurb-confectioner, the other an intellectual exegete who would ponder the "human condition" in a pile of burning rubbish. Just such rubbish is put before both men in a fatuous mystery play. In a way, Hound is a miniaturized travesty of R. and G., since the two critics cannot grasp the play they are watching any better than R. and G. could fathom Hamlet. The critics become unintentionally involved in the action and are both shot to death. Stoppard is a ' word mimic and a born parodist. But parody is parasitic and needs a strong host body. With Hamlet...