Word: opium
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Clever, opium-puffing Producer Cocteau (his fans call him "the cleverest man alive") has allowed his pipe dreams only a soupcon of surrealist-Freudian flavor. The surreal touch is applied to several scenes with absolute poetic Tightness: by retarding to slow motion Beauty's terror-struck sprint through the Beast's castle, Cocteau conveys every decibel of the shriek she cannot release. There is also plenty of surreal wit: the Beast's eyes, ears, nose and fingernails fume when the fires of lust blaze up in him; and Beauty's tears turn to diamonds...
...History's most talkative addict was Thomas De Quincey (The Confessions of an English Opium Eater), who took laudanum (like morphine, derived from opium). He yielded to the habit four times in 40 years, finally cured himself by tapering off, the most painful cure...
...free of the monster. But would he accept his freedom? It seemed doubtful. It would be too easy to lay boards across the tops of a billion sedans and start all over again with jet propulsion, foam rubber wheels and special lighters for the motorist's neon-trimmed opium pipe...
...Shall Speak for Me?" The elections which Nationalist China held, like the Chinese military situation, left much to be desired. All men & women 21 and over, literate or illiterate, were eligible to vote, provided they had never been convicted of treason, political corruption or opium smoking. But since the election was the first of its kind in Chinese history, and since no polls were open in Communist areas, the turnout was rather small. Finally, since more than 95% of the Chinese people can neither read nor write, many a voter had to accept help in marking his ballot from friendly...
Baudelaire's parents tried to check his dissipations and steer him into a commercial career, but succeeded only in drawing him from respectability into the Latin Quarter. He was soon living in wild extravagance with a "saucer-eyed" mulatto prostitute and seeking in absinthe and opium an antidote to what he considered the horrors of the Steam Age. He was, he wrote, a victim of "Acedia, the malady of monks," the deadly weakness of the will which leads to sloth and idleness. He fought against it with terror, filled his Journals with resolves to "work like a madman...