Word: madmen
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Understandably, Las Vegas bookmakers offer no odds-even unofficial odds-on the 1968 presidential contest. They figure that the betting on this race should be left to amateurs and madmen...
Journey was a semiautobiographical story of a doctor, known in the book as Ferdinand Bardamu. "I have spent so many years as a doormat in the service of so many thousands of madmen that my memories alone would fill a whole insane asylum," Céline said. The novel was such an asylum. It seemed less a novel than a charade by a troupe of epileptics-convulsed by spasms of lust, rage, fear and disgust but denied the unconsciousness that is the mercy accorded the epileptic. It was clear to most critics that it was a work of genius...
Cowardice Confounds. Hunger at length forces the man back into the world of men-or, as Dennis suggests with his bleakly sardonic view of the human race, of madmen and brutes. He is interrogated as a spy, but his unabashed cowardice confounds the military. The enemy colonel, a man of some humor, decides to let him stay in his greenhouse-with the remark that if all his countrymen were like that, the war would be over very soon. The greenhouse thus becomes a "glass house," British soldiers' slang for a military prison. But it is a greenhouse...
...thrives in the U.S. today in the hands of such writers as Saul Bellow-whose Herzog has his great moment at the end of the book when he manages to summon enough strength to tell his cleaning woman to sweep the kitchen. Other literary "heroes" are fall guys, incipient madmen, badgered Everymen, victims. Their motto, says Daniel Aaron, professor of English at Smith, seems to be, "Call me schlemiel." In more mundane life, there is much revulsion against the pose, if not the reality, of heroism. "Ya wanna be a hero?" is a mockery, not a compliment...
...PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. The inventive direction of Peter Brook and the superb performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company players as madmen in a masque make exciting theater out of Peter Weiss's philosophical drama...