Word: mountebanking
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Dirksen's oratory succeeded in part because it functioned simultaneously as a satire upon oratory, in somewhat the way that Mae West has always been a walking satire upon sex. But all of and splendor, with his rapscallion rhapsodies and hints of the mountebank, could not conceal a small truth about what that ahead for the ancient discipline of rhetoric: an art that wanes into self-mockery is dying...
...Eventually, Louise disappears but Schlumberger remains. The Turk frees him from the fear of losing a match publicly and gives him the power to expose Maelzel at any time. For his part, Maelzel exploits Schlumberger's gift for his own profit and dreams of a truly automated player. Mountebank that he is, Maelzel desperately wishes that the Turk could be a total machine, one that he could control completely...
...good relations between the college and the town. Although the time when Commencement Day was "a holiday throughout the province when the shops of Boston were generally closed and the proprietors repaired to the Cambridge common, which was completely taken possession of by drinking stands, dancing booths, mountebank shows and gaming tables," he could still write that "in Cambridge the college has always been deferential to the town authorities...
Offsetting the energetic Vandervane in this novel is his friend Douglas Yandell, the 34-year-old narrator. Yandell, a competent, dull music critic, hangs on to his job at a London paper "if only to keep out the sort of little mountebank likely to do a turn at it between a spell on the books page and the real prize spot, the restaurant column...
...furor El Topo is neither a cathartic masterpiece, as its disciples believe, nor a con job, and Jodorowsky is neither messiah nor mountebank. There are scenes of brilliance in El Topo, followed by sequences of unwieldy pretension. The film is by turns comic and profound, hysterical and pompous, fully complex enough to deserve more than a simple...