Word: mucked
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Traditional novelists toss pebbles into domestic pools and then take notes. The postwar fashion has been to track these projectiles directly into the muck below, but there is another, older way. As masters like Henry James and Virginia Woolf knew, the ripples on the surface can bedevil the eye and engage the mind. Before My Time brushes up this earlier technique. It transforms a brief disturbance of hearth and home into an age of anxiety...
...crust had formed, and the cooling earth lay exposed to the developing atmosphere." The next 110 pages are taken up with discourses on magma and glaciers, the planet's prehistoric upheavals. Then come the prehistoric beasts, which the author vaguely anthropomorphizes: a lovely Diplodocus wandering in the muck "toward dusk on a spring evening one hundred and thirty-six million years ago" finds herself growing "irritable...
Fortunately, enough of Brooks's humor filters through the muck of wrong camera angles and oafish acting to make Blazing Saddles worth seeing...
Hollywood works in artificial extremes. The sticky old westerns or cop movies were based on the assumption that America was full of a spirit of egalitarian community and open land, and that only the aberrant would want to muck things up. The garish new breed of police thrillers tells us that the U.S. drives all its citizens crazy, our cities are virtual insane asylums, and the only objective standard and reforming force is the power...
...liar for a living." F.D.R. concurred. Joe McCarthy kicked him in the groin. Harry Truman ranked him among his top s.o.b.s. In fact, Columnist Drew Pearson was often misinformed and vindictive in the pursuit of his foes, but he was never intentionally mendacious. A courtly Quaker gentleman, he raked muck with a silver hoe-he married money and made $7,000 a week in his heyday-and set a pattern of investigative reporting and permanently emboldened American journalism...