Word: grips
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...December. It is particularly burdensome for the poor, who are least able to adjust to the ever higher cost of goods and services. By making U.S. products costlier and less competitive on world markets, it has also hurt the nation's bal ance of payments. Inflation's grip is so tenacious that it will undoubtedly take all of the Government's weapons and will to curtail it for any sustained period...
Strung out on Dr. Spielvogel's couch, Portnoy becomes the first of the lie-down comics. Raised in Newark and now holding the post of Assistant Human Opportunities Commissioner in New York City, he renders his past absurd in an attempt to lessen its painful grip on him. He keens the familiar tale of the strongwilled, overattentive mother and the castrated father. He tells how his mother fondled him during toilet training, how she eroticized the insides of his ears while removing the wax, and how she forced him to eat at knife point. Portnoy is continuingly being floored...
France, 1944. Hysterically, a German soldier tries to break the American sergeant's stranglehold. But there is no escape; the grip grows tighter until the soldier chokes to death. The sergeant releases his victim -and his own breath returns in a series of orgasmic spasms...
...PARTY and THE BASEMENT. In any Pinter play, the denouement is total uncertainty. The audience knows less in the end than it thought it knew at the beginning. Even though these two one-acters are lesser Pinter, the playgoer is still held in the author's subtle grip. In Tea Party, a successful manufacturer of bathroom hardware is driven into a catatonic state by the interactions of his wife, her brother and his secretary. The Basement presents two men and a girl in a power struggle that leaves the meaning of the outcome to the mind of the beholder...
...condition them. This kind of rigid social determinism is discredited by the empirical truth that the institutions of the Soviet Union have largely been changed but its people seem just as avaricious as any in the world. The two developments are linked. Capitalism breeds a capitalist mentality but its grip is not unshakable. A man can, of his own free will, renounce his old mentality for a new one. Radicalism will breed just as fragile a radical mentality. The choice belongs to, and remains with, each...