Word: morbidities
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...oldtimers on Prout's Neck still remember their famous neighbor. They tell of how he raised pink carnations behind his studio, and how, when it was hot, he wore a wet sponge on his head out of a morbid fear of sunstroke. He would slash away with his cane at clumps of elderberries, because he considered the elderberry "weak." His great passion was the sea, which he painted, not as something seen through a dream as did the more mystical Albert Ryder, but as man's restless, churning, ever-changing challenge...
...Another current song records the fate of a red Indian named Running Bear (Mercury) who leaps into angry rapids to swim to his Little White Dove. She dives in, too, from the opposite bank of the river, and they drown happily into the hereafter. But nothing in the 1960 morbid-ditty collection can touch Tell Laura I Love Her (RCA Victor), a best-selling ballad set in the flaming wreckage of a stock car. Tommy, the dying driver, has entered the race to win money to buy a wedding ring; he gasps out the hit tune with his dying breath...
Locomotive Chorus. When country singing came out of the hills, its highly developed morbid strain came too, and the form soon adapted itself to new material: guitarists began twanging out such up-to-date items as Old Man Atom with a locomotive chorus ("Hir-o-shi-ma, Na-ga-sa-ki"). When little Kathy Fiscus died at the bottom of a California well in 1949, the Ballad of Kathy Fiscus was probably inevitable, like the more recent Ballad of Caryl Chessman and today's Ballad of Francis Powers...
...Rosaluxemburgsky. Adopting two saints' names in the hagiography of Marxism* was his last chance to stay out of trouble. Instead, he sighs the wrong sort of sigh ("a purely pathological phenomenon") before a poster mourning the death of a party bigwig; he is denounced for antiSemitism, mysticism and "morbid eroticism"-being in love. Furthermore, he cannot get the Chinese question fixed in his mind. He is jailed but eventually wangles a job in the Department of Animal Breeding supervising the production of purebred rabbits for the entire district. The pair of rabbits assigned to Roitschwantz are dead...
Scout and her brother live in Maycomb, Alabama, where every family that amounts to anything has a streak-a peculiar streak, or a morbid streak, or one involving a little ladylike tippling at Lydia Pinkham bottles filled with gin. The Finch family streak is a good deal more serious -it is an overpowering disposition toward sanity. This is the flaw that makes Jem interrupt the boasting of a lineage-proud dowager to ask "Is this the Cousin Joshua who was locked up for so long?" And it is what compels Lawyer Atticus Finch, the children's father, to defend...