Word: owlish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cabinet, parliament and the judiciary, the mullahs had been chipping away at Banisadr's sources of power. They succeeded in shutting down his newspaper, ousting his sympathizers from government posts and finally getting him dismissed two weeks ago as commander in chief of the armed forces. The owlish, 48-year-old economist had launched a belated bid to shore up his presidency by soliciting support from generals who applauded his frequent front line tours in the war with Iraq. But the military, wary of the risks of political involvement, chose to remain neutral...
Fallaci has shown strengths as the grand inquisitor of such disparate leaders as Henry Kissinger and the Ayatullah Khomeini. Here she assumes her customary tone of moral outrage, but the hero, a deceased Greek revolutionary, is as unpromising in death as he was thwarted in life. The owlish collector of excesses is soon faced with an embarrassment of riches-and sometimes just with an embarrassment. For connoisseurs of melodrama there is the first meeting of narrator and martyr: "You were to have many faces, many names ... you were a Vietcong girl... You told me about a god with a yellow...
...collected by Susan Hyman in Edward Lear's Birds (Morrow; 96 pages; $37.95), belong on the same shelf with Audubon's. The line drawings and sketches that accompany them shed new light on the man himself. Many artists have used birds to lampoon their fellow men. The owlish Lear used them to caricature himself...
...little birdie oh/ With his little toe, toe, toe!" At the Cambridge Latin School in Cambridge, Mass., Estlin tried to write a poem a day. Sample at age 16: "God, keep me trying to win the prize;/ Pamper me not,though I be crying./ Though snickering worlds wink owlish eyes, God,keep me trying." Harvard (A.B. 1915, M.A. 1916) all but undid this model boy. His discovery of the decadent poets of the 1890s led him to write lines like "(Oh God!) the wonder of you-" Courtesy of Ezra Pound, he also fell in with free verse and the imagist...
...almost fails before it gets started, conforming to the theatrical convention Simon has created for himself. But they have the good grace to be self-conscious about their verbal twitchiness. They understand there are more important matters at stake here. As a result, the movie is rather blurred-an owlish comedy, as it were. Yet, if Simon still does not quite trust himself to express his feelings fully, Chapter Two remains thought provoking...