Word: guttering
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Last week, to his astonishment, he lost. The jury unanimously found Exit obscene. In so doing, it crisply ignored the testimony of a number of literary lights who contended that the book was a near masterpiece that denounced the gutter by wallowing in it. Critic Frank Kermode, former co-editor of Encounter, argued that he "was horrified by it, but impressed by its novelty, originality and moral power. Dealing as it does with the lower depths of a great city, it is very much in the tradition of Dickens." Since Selby offered a minutely detailed chronicle of unremitting violence, perversion...
...first fire was in a shoe store. When fire engines screamed to the scene, rocks flew. One fireman, caught squarely in the jaw, was knocked from a truck to the gutter. More and more rioters were drawn to the streets by the sound of the sirens and a sense of summer excitement...
...above all, his otherworldly films (The Blood of a Poet, The Eternal Return, Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, Les Enfants Terribles). He was also given to scandalous public poses as an overt homosexual and self-confessed drug user. But unlike Oscar Wilde, who tripped and fell into the gutter of Victorian reality while trying to walk his mystic way, Cocteau, for all of his histrionics and acrobatics, always managed to regain a safe perch. He was somehow able to have his cakewalking, eat his opium, and yet wind up a middle-class immortal, a member of that superrespectable college...
...Lowell declared the play a theatrical experience of sheer delight, even if its political argument was pernicious nonsense; Kerr and Lionel Abel took no delight at all in the politics, and found no other grounds for applause. MacBird's referents in real life are obvious and tangible: a jowly, gutter-mouthed Lyndon Johnson supported by assorted cronies and a megalomaniacal wife; a string of identical Kennedys whose misfortunes (the assassination, Bobby's exile and Ted's plane crash) are attributed to the Chief's ambition and insecurity; and a few foreshortened political standbys like Stevenson, Warren and Wayne Morse...
...their children as anything but innocent, while the children can hardly imagine their parents engaged in sexual intercourse. Urbanization deprives children of what used to be learned through simple observation on the farm; middle-class life often keeps them from the rough-and-ready expertise "picked up in the gutter." Given the alarming statistics about rising venereal-disease rates and unwed teen-age pregnancies, it is no wonder that parents increasingly feel that they cannot cope with the situation and turn to the school for help...