Word: morbidity
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...think a lot of people don't like existentialism because they're leery of Sartre," he noted. "When he says 'Man is a futile passion,' they conclude that all existentialism is negative. Actually this is mainly Sartre's temperament--he has a taste for the morbid...
...esthetic "ism" spring, obviously. from sources akin to those of Rousseau, Satie, Jarry and Apollinaire. Author Shattuck tries hard-and on the whole unsuccessfully-to cram all these tricks into a single bag. Despite the hearty, festive ring of the title, the "Banquet Years," says Author Shattuck, were essentially morbid. In his view they show the connection between modern art and a world that had lost its God and sprawled on the earth with many a gaping hole knocked through it. While the attempt to make four eccentric figures speak for an entire era is muddled, the figures themselves-four...
...remaining 79 years of his life, Calouste Gulbenkian caught precious few glimpses of gutters, particularly since in young manhood he developed the habit of sprinting from a rented limousine to the door of his destination in morbid fear of assassination. As he became a legendary oil financier and fabled art collector, Gulbenkian also kept on collecting what he most loved: money. When he died in 1955. his five-shilling piece had grown to an estimated $420 million, his annual income to $14 million...
...ever intenser stimulants to create even the illusion of feeling. Stepping up the tempo, "go, go, go" becomes the rhythm of madness and self-destruction. The future of the Beat Generation can be read in its past-the James Deans and Dylan Thomases and Charlie "Yardbird" Parkers-and the morbid speed with which its romantic heroes become its martyred legends...
...Vienna before World War I, the maddest celebrity in town was Oskar Kokoschka. His morbid plays dramatizing strife between the sexes set off bitter café debates; his portraits turning the light on the psychological "inner life" of his subjects outraged complacent burghers. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne (whose assassination at Sarajevo in 1914 triggered World War I), gave it as his opinion that "this fellow's bones ought to be broken in his body." After the war, which dealt Kokoschka a head wound and a bayoneting, the artist moved to the front rank of avant...