Word: madding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...call me mad, rash, incorrigible, proud, irreconcilable, deluded and all the rest," Frederick William Rolfe once wrote to a critic. "But you must allow me to lead my life upon that higher and uncrowded plane where supernatural influences work unchecked . .. Have you not realized yet that it is not an ordinary, but an extraordinary man with whom you have to deal...
...Panama shovels snow. Carew is rooted now, and the mercurial moods that marked his early career seldom surface. "When I ask Charryse what Daddy does, she says, 'Daddy strikes out. I explain to her that Daddy doesn't strike out very often. But how can you get mad at fans when your own kids knock you? I leave my game at the park. When I go home to play with my kids, they don't care if I went 0 for 4. They're happy to see me. In the end, it's your family...
While it is setting up such questions, the film-based on H.G. Wells' novel -gives promise of being a fairly gripping fantasy-adventure. But it answers all the questions too soon and then has nowhere to go. Moreau turns out to be a mad visionary who, having partially cracked the genetic code, is trying to breed animals into human beings. The servants are some of his handiwork. As for those creatures in the jungle, they represent Moreau's near misses - brut ish humanoids who cannot transcend their origins as bears, lions, hyenas...
...beauty is the beast. This is also true in much of Nabokov's fiction. The delectable nymphet Lolita has a cruel, popsicle heart. The exquisite sensibilities of her middle-aged lover Humbert Humbert are grotesquely twisted by lust. Charles Kinbote, whose magical memories feed Pale Fire, is hopelessly mad, as is Luzhin, the chessmaster in The Defense...
With his characteristic self-parodying wit, Nabokov once said: "I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better-balanced mad mind than mine." It was the mind of an exile imprisoned in memories of a culture swept away by revolution and war. Born April 23, 1899, into an intellectual, upper-class St. Petersburg family, Nabokov enjoyed the benefits of wealth, position and a Western European education. English was his first language, taught by an English nanny. French and Russian were learned, as he said, "at my nurses' knees-two nurses, four knees." His mother encouraged his early poetic...