Word: luridness
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...book is a canny mix of fact and rumor about the monk, whose skill in doctoring the Tsarina's sick son gained him inordinate influence over the royal family in the final decade of the Russian empire. By prudish Soviet standards, Pikul's empurpled prose is downright lurid. In one key scene, for example, Rasputin sneaks up to the Tsarina as she prays for her hemophiliac son. Out of the shadows steps the "bony peasant, his face framed by long hair parted in the center and glistening with oil, his eyes emitting a kind of hypnotic sparkle...
...Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for himself and Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and Byron White, accused the court of overreacting to the risks of prejudicial publicity in the Clapp murder case. News articles about the case were "placid, routine and innocuous," wrote Blackmun. "There was no screaming headline, no lurid photograph, no front-page overemphasis." Nonetheless, the court "reached for a strict and flat result," he said, an "inflexible rule" that ignores or pays little heed to "the important interests of the public and the press (as a part of that public) in open judicial proceedings...
...magazines, Time. Campus Shock is a Time cover story filled with water and wood pulp, a distended magazine article--the very titles wail with the self-justifying banshee pitch of the media-hyped Big Story: "Campus Shock," "Sexual Anarchy," "Grade Frenzy." And the vignettes, written in the best lurid style of not even Time, but True Detective...
DIED. Jean Rhys, 84, reclusive British author who wrote critically acclaimed novels in the '30s, disappeared for 20 years, and regained celebrity with the 1967 publication of Wide Sargasso Sea; in Exeter, England. Struck by her "instinct for form" and "almost lurid passion for stating the case of the underdog," Ford Madox Ford became her literary mentor and, ironically, a model for the contemptible men in her stories who invariably prey on fragile, Rhys-like heroines. Rhys, who was writing her memoirs when she died, observed: "If you want to write the truth, you must write about yourself...
...VIOLENCE. Potentially interesting subjects, especially when you're talking about television. Robert Wood, one-time president of CBS, for example, vetoes a script for The Waltons because it describes (in lurid and graphic detail) Mary Ellen's "confused reaction to her first menstrual period." Lee Grant--Phyllis to sitcom junkies-- asks her daughter whether she lost her virginity on a ski weekend with a group of teenagers. "The subject matter was simply unacceptable for Family Viewing. It dealt too directly with sex." CBS editors jokingly called the episode--which the writer titled "Bess, Is You a Woman Now,"--"Did Bess...