Word: madman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Excavated Shops. To set the scene for his four-week festival, Menotti refurbished the town with such gusto that the astounded inhabitants started calling him Il Matto (The Madman). He tore out neon street lighting and substituted antique carriage lanterns, got Cathedral Square temporarily deconsecrated so intermission-coffee tables could be placed outside the adjacent theater. At the same time, a group of townsmen dug out a row of medieval shops, now stocked with modern paintings and Italian bric-a-brac. Facelifting and the scheduled productions have cost roughly $250,000, and even with private and foundation support, Menotti...
...years later, as Togliatti was leaving Rome's Chamber of Deputies, pistol shots cracked in the heavy July air, and Togliatti fell wounded. With a scream of horror, a woman darted forward and flung herself protectively over Togliatti's body. The madman assassin, betrayed perhaps by chivalrous instincts, hesitated to shoot again, and was caught. The comrade with the pretty legs had saved Togliatti's life...
...more or less obsessed with demonstrating the inadequacy of the categories through which we see things. But whereas Sommer exercises his ingenuity to subvert the reality principle, the others rip aside the workaday facade of sanity with even less regard for the reader's preconceptions than a genuine madman. They destroy the grammatical and conceptual continuities on which we base our hackneyed understanding without offering anything on which to hang a new vision of things, and the result is often mere anarchy...
...living in a peaceful English village with devoted, decent parents find such an acquaintance rewarding? The answer lies in a bracketed look at 1) the parents' possessive dullness, 2) the child's imagination and romantic thirst for life, brought into play for the first time when the madman's own imagination reaches out in sympathy and need. Conventionally, this ominous encounter ends well after a long spell of breath-holding on the part of the reader as well as the parents. But its bitterly ironic aftertaste lies in the fact that the parents' agony...
...Convention nominated T.R. for Vice-President. "Don't any of you realize," said the G.O.P. Old Guard national chairman, Ohio's Mark Hanna, in private, "that there's only one life between this madman and the White House?" In the fateful September of 1901, when McKinley was shot by Anarchist Leon Czolgosz at Buffalo, word swept the nation that Boss Hanna had devised a new phrase: "That damned cowboy is in the White House...