Word: idiot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...area trapped between Sartoris impotence and Snopes viciousness explains Faulkner's harshness and fury. He is a man possessed and tortured by his vision: too honest to deny it, too sensitive to tolerate it. The horrors of his books-the rapes and castrations, the incestuous romances and idiot flirtations with cows-fall into place, not as exhibits of sensationalism, but instead as images of the social and moral disease that he is constantly probing...
...tragedy. His was a life dominated by gnawing fears and nagging frustrations. As a child, Luther had watched his father destroy himself after learning of his wife's infidelity. As a man, he had found joy neither in his scraggly wife nor his children, one of them an idiot. Only in revivalist religion did he find any outlet for his cramped, unexercised emotions...
Francis is an Army mule who can talk. He gives orders in a voice which sounds like Wallace Becry imitating an Army mule; these orders are taken by an amicable idiot played gracefully by Donald O'Connor. Francis knows how to win the war single-footedly, and O'Connor can wiggle his cars and heehaw softly. Together they make an unbeatable combat team, but they do not make a very funny movie...
...Izaak Walton's rules was "to make as little noise as I can when I am fishing," and generations of fishermen have put it down as the kind of common sense that only an idiot would disagree with. Fishermen, it appeared last week, had not taken into account the implacable curiosity of science. In San Francisco, University of Michigan Zoologist Karl Lagler reported a 66-day fishing experiment on a quiet Livingston County, Mich, lake (980 man-hours, 1,561 fish). Every other day a colleague buzzed the experimenters in a noisy outboard, but the racket never hurt...
That conviction makes him impatient with "expressionist" painting that springs only from imagination. "An idiot surely puts himself into what he does," Marin says, and adds, "the high priest of art don't give a damn who did it." He has even less sympathy for "nonobjective" painters who substitute dead geometry for breathing life...