Word: monstrous
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...acoustics are good, and it seats 2,700 people. It lacks the frigid and pompous vulgarity of theaters like the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center or, worse still, Edward Durrell Stone's monstrous box of upholstered Mussolini at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. But that is not saying a great deal. The design, with its pleats of white birch, hanging plastic doughnuts and faired-in lights, is weirdly Art Deco: it could be the set for a lavish Buck Rogers movie from the '30s-"Desist, Zorka, or you will destroy...
...only cure is to wait two months between short stories, and this the reader is urged to do. One of the best stories in the first of the collection (thus readable immediately, with no waiting) is called Southern Throughway. It concerns a monstrous traffic jam that develops when vacationers make the mistake of trying to return to Paris one hot Sunday afternoon. As sweat, futility, broiled metal and curses coagulate into semi-permanency (the jam continues through the night, through the next day, the next night, endures for a week, persists for a month, maybe for two months, well into...
...over, and perhaps with it, the overpowering sense in most students that the military was engaged in a monstrous criminal venture. Feelings of outrage have been replaced by mild resignation, a feeling that the army won't go away so we might as well learn to live with it. As long as the military is at peace, this argument runs, it is best to acknowledge that the structure of world politics requires the United States to keep a standing army...
...consequence, Watergate, which is close to home, has gripped students here as well as the rest of the nation while the more monstrous Nixon crimes go unnoticed. There is no Cambodian Bach Mai Hospital to which one can point as a vivid and burning reminder that that war has not ended...
McGuane's own trademark is the monstrous practical joke that is at the center of all his books. In The Sporting Club, a demonic hoax-artist contrived to destroy an exclusive hunt club in northern Michigan. The Bushwhacked Piano contained a lunatic scheme to cash in on antipesticide sentiment by selling tall towers stocked with insect-eating bats...