Word: monstrously
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...externally fertilized human egg into the sixth day of cell division, and by an Italian scientist, Daniele Petrucci, who a few years later announced that he had kept alive an embryo in a test tube for 29 days. The embryo was destroyed, Petrucci said, because it was growing "monstrous." He dropped the work entirely after it was condemned by the Vatican...
...speaking another language, easily recounting acts of aggression and mayhem that might give even hardened criminals pause. Asked why an ice pick was his preferred weapon in a previous assault, a thin, pale, seemingly fragile boy chuckles and answers, "Internal bleeding." The more they talk, the less monstrous they become: "I wouldn't mind goin' to school if I knew how to read . . . My dreams scare me ... I want somebody to know I been here . . . I can't do nothing. I can't function...
STILL, THE LAST WALTZ suffers from conditions endemic to big-time rock and roll. The American music industry has grown to monstrous proportions, so much so that much of its fabled opulence has become a narcissistic orgy, celebrating the joys of popularity and immense wealth. The vulturistic entrepreneurs, represented in an earlier era by the smarmy Dick Clark, have been succeeded by the slicker, if equally self-inflating and profit-minded Don Kirshner types. Had The Last Waltz somehow fallen into the hands of such a producer, the movie would have been a shlocky disaster regardless of the music...
...wire Statuette of Alexander Calder. "Le Samourai" again is reminiscent of characters painted with a thick brush. Only it is as if the long black strokes suddenly begin to drip down with the sheer weight of the paint and hence bulge at the ends like some monstrous pseudopodia of amoebae. This biomorphis is a common feature of the works--the fusion of natural and artificial objects is like that of Jean Arp, the founder of the Zurich Dada movement who later associated with both Surrealists and Abstractionists. "Le Samourai" brings to mind one of the anthropomorphisizing and metamorphosizing images...
...influence on writers from Sherwood Anderson to Norman Mailer. His tragedy was in staying too long at the zoo until his fellow visitors began to notice a want of sympathy and substance. Back in 1942, Critic Alfred Kazin observed that Mencken's "conception of the aesthetic life . . . was monstrous in its frivolity and ignorance." Others soon echoed the critique. Finally, even the subject obliquely acknowledged it. In Six Men, Alistair Cooke recalls a 1955 visit. The invalided Mencken wondered when Poet Edgar Lee Masters had passed on. In 1948, Cooke guessed. "That's right," said Mencken. "I believe...