Word: happen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have doomed a lesser writer. This is not a thesis play; nor is it a deep one. And it is not a comedy about sophisticated, upper-crust society--which is much easier to write. The author chose the just-plain-folks, people-in-the-house-next-door, it-could-happen-to-you genre, set within the framework of a specific middle-class cultural milieu--the sort that has tempted many American writers, with varying success, ever since Abie's Irish Rose...
...learned how to decompose and recompose matter electronically. Soon he has accidentally concocted two creatures consisting of parts of himself and parts of a horsefly. Fox, now that its Fly is open, offers a careful "$100 to the first person who can prove it can't happen...
...frightening inner swamps of fear and desperation. What he finds in himself is a weak schizophrenic who sees the world and normal people masked against him. Spying on his own inner self, or on the girl and her father, becomes more important to him than anything that can happen in the workaday world, which in any case he thinks is a fraud. The girl is not unlike him: "She picks up the scent of things people are ashamed of; she sniffs at implied meanings, follows through the traces of hidden humiliations, unable to break away from them...
Among fictional detectives, the most numerous are the Newton types. Popped on the head by the apples of sinister circumstance, they gravitate to solutions by prodigies of deduction. Amateur Detective Ambrose Usher, an Oxford don, is different. Says a baffled friend: "Things don't happen to you: you happen to things. You walk into a perfectly quiet situation . . ." Replies Ambrose: "Oh, dear. Yes, yes. It may be. I'm the apple itself, perhaps. What an awkward role...
...school play, which was really excellent-but costly! We spent, for a patron's contribution and tickets and costumes for four, $26.40. Isn't that steep? Does the same thing happen in public schools? Was it really good to have the schoolchildren in their uniforms seek patrons from among the neighboring store owners, mostly men of other faiths? This money goes, I understand, for lay teachers' salaries. Surely there is another way to raise such funds; it isn't up to the children...