Word: monomaniacally
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...alien corn on the Cobb campus, is daunted to learn that the faculty does not drink and dines on unspiced food at 6:30 p.m. Pryar is one among seven visiting fellows. Each of them is a distinguished specialist in some recondite field, or rather is a monomaniac locked inside an ever-narrowing preoccupation -Andean Spiolus, patristic hagiography among the Slavs, Emily Dickinson or whatever. These learned freaks (the Slavonic specialist is a midget female dipsomaniac; the spider man talks like a Pennsylvania Dutch commercial; the Emily Dickinson man has discovered from the lady poet's "image clusters" that...
...Moby Dick is the voyage of a soul as well as a ship, and that journey goes willfully off course. What is missing is the tragic sense. Captain Ahab is an authentic tragic hero; Welles makes him merely a monomaniac of vengeance. In book and play, Ahab speaks of the "malice inscrutable" of the White Whale. His mate Starbuck, the voice of reason, reminds him that "a poor dumb thing" can have no malice. What Welles fails to grasp is that it is the inscrutability that maddens Ahab, for Moby Dick is the universal mystery of things as they...
...judgment on Wilson (Harry Townes): "God gave us his Ten Commandments; we broke them. Wilson gave us his Fourteen Points; we shall see." On the whole, the note of authenticity was worth the price of occasional stiltedness, particularly in the juxtaposition of a courageous Lincoln (Michael Tolan) with a monomaniac McClellan, a tough T. R. (boisterously acted by Larry Blyden) with a reactionary J. P. Morgan, who remarked magnificently, on hearing that Roosevelt had gone on a safari: "I hope the first lion who sees him does his duty...