Word: mouths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just then a small girl, probably ten or less, darted into the bar. She composed herself, then marched up calmly to the first table and began in a flat monotone, How many delicious candy bars will you buy made so fine (they melt in your mouth) especially for the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church of Wichita Kansas girls' track team. She droned on for about a minute, looking expectant. She repeated the litany three or four times, but nobody was buying...
...Manet's etchings and a few haunting daguerreotypes, the poet's face is more familiar than his work. Eyes: piercing and "as brilliant as drops of coffee," to borrow Baudelaire's own phrase. Face: as angled with cutting edges as an ascetic on a fast. Mouth: mocking and self-mocking, with lips shaped for sneers and blasphemies. Dress: black with dazzling white shirt and pale pink gloves-Satan as dandy. Add a setting (thick carpets, low lights, leather volumes of the more decadent Latin poets, the fragrance of hashish everywhere, a black girl coming...
Timing is crucial if one is to avoid clumsy lurches and even broken teeth. Aim is vitally important. In social kissing, the lips can strike anywhere from behind the ear to the center of the mouth, depending upon the kisser's fervor or sobriety. Sometimes a talent for evasion helps. Shirley Temple Black, just retired as a U.S. diplomat, says that over the years, "I have developed a dart-and-dodge technique to avoid the kiss on the mouth...
...laid-back characters he keeps en countering. How, one wonders, will this cultural laggard cope with them? And even if he catches their drift, what if they get tough with him? He suggests a physical fragility that may not permit him to put enough muscle behind his hard-working mouth. There's good suspense here, the kind that derives from really caring for a singular individual...
...example, a female speaker designated "Mouth" commits an extended monologue on the shock she felt when she found herself talking out loud after a mute childhood. She speaks in short, half-connected bursts, yet Beckett's stingy way with words captures her existence fully:"... parents unknown ... unheard of... he having vanished ... thin air ... no sooner buttoned up his breeches... she similarly... eight months later ... almost to the tick ... so no love ... spared that ... no love such as normally vented on the ... speechless infant..." In a phrase as simple as "spared that," Beckett blends savage humor and poignancy...