Word: numb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...extras are the first things to go at a company, and public relations is considered an extra." Until last week, Jo Ann Coogan, 30, of Dearborn, Mich., was planning to open a small brokerage. But her start-up money was heavily invested in the stock market. "I'm numb," she says. "All of a sudden you see how all of your life is affected by something like this...
...books are parents of Bennington students, because "within ten minutes of finishing either, you will be on your way up to Vermont to pull your kid out." And in Vanity Fair, James Wolcott wrote an almost scholarly piece on the chroniclers of the young and wasted, pronouncing them "too numb to feel, to cool to care...Current fiction is festooned with their razor cuts and insignia. Listen closely and the lite-FM melodies of Ann Beattie snarl into a more hostile noise...
...Bret Easton Ellis' Less than Zero, a timely bit of voyeurism about the sordid lives of rich Los Angeles youth. As the title suggests, the characters are intellectual and emotional ciphers. Ellis' documentary intentions are clear, but his laconic descriptions of numb fornications, pharmacological excesses and teenage nihilism come dangerously close to violating Mark Twain's third rule of writing: "That the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others...
Eventually Lewis and his wife Julie bear their grief in different directions: she to a country cottage to live in solitude and play her violin, he no farther than the couch to numb himself with television and Scotch. He stirs periodically to walk to Whitehall, where he is a desultory member of a government subcommittee on, of all things, child development...
...idea, of course, is that molar sodium 24 has zonked out both pedophiliac and pedophiliee to such a degree that they have become numb, orgiastically numb, to the horror of their situation...