Word: morbid
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...within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. Daddy was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, Daddy was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape...
...vanguard of the poetic revolution that introduced the vernacular into verse. Like Eliot, he has written very little (three volumes of verse and three of criticism), but that little he has written with iridescent precision. Like Eliot, he was infected with the century's accidia, sank into morbid pessimism, rose again in religious hope. Unlike Eliot, however, Montale has not trained his spirit to the lattice of traditional theology; his God is a rough diamond hewn from the igneous rock of experience...
This cruelly candid self-assessment appears in the remembrance of his nephew Robin, who is himself a novelist (The Servant, The Slaves of Timbuktu). And although the effect is morbid, it is by far the best part of the book, which is otherwise devoted to a soporific account of the family genealogy. Death watches can be questioned on grounds of taste, but it is certainly true that Willie Maugham did not die well...
...takes greater pleasure, and profit, from the new craze than Los Angeles' Ed ("Big Daddy") Roth, the 275-lb. supply sergeant for Hell's Angels, who was first on the bandwagon, has sold 51,800 to date. Roth, who specializes in morbid-art decals for the hip trade (latest sample: a baby with sign reading "Born Dead"), sees the Iron Crosses as setting a whole new trend, and he has already followed up with an even newer vogue: plastic copies of the Wehrmacht iron helmet. Says he: "They really reach into a kid's deepest emotions." Beyond...
Even the book's title is morbid; it comes from the movie, "King's Row" in which Reagan, discovering that both his legs have been amputated, utters the anguished line, "Where's the rest of me?" And the first chapter begins "with a close-up of a bottom as the newly born Reagan gets whacked into consciousness...