Word: painfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...perhaps because those masters flourished in simpler times, they were merely funny. Baker has taken newspaper humor a step further. He has turned it into literature?funny, but full of the pain and absurdity of the age. Those qualities probably keep a few readers away. Said an otherwise admiring Jack Rosenthal, assistant editor of the Times's editorial page, when asked to cite any deficiencies in the column: "Too serious...
Much of Baker's humor is the fife accompaniment to the Sousa march of his own sturdy good sense, as when he announced in a recent column his refusal to buy a car that cost more than the house he grew up in, $5,900. When Baker expresses pain, it tends to be with only the parody of a whimper, as in a 1977 column he titled "A Taxpayer's Prayer": "O mighty Internal Revenue, who turneth the labor of man to ashes, we thank thee for the multitude of thy forms which thou has set before...
...adult again and again conquers childhood fears. Says Stoller: "Triumph, rage, revenge, fear, anxiety, risk are all condensed into one complex buzz called 'sexual excitement.' " In Stoller's view, that buzz has an even harsher component: sadomasochism, the deriving of pleasure from inflicting or experiencing pain. As he puts it, "My hunch is that the desire to hurt others in retaliation for having been hurt is essential for most people's sexual excitement all the time but not for all people's excitement all the time...
...another, and required the impartial weighing of all the relevant facts to determine what the patient would have wanted, which only a court can accomplish. The relevant facts would include expert medical testimony, the best estimates of the values and beliefs of the patient concerning medical care, and the pain that he would have to endure without knowing...
...Elizabeth has the fragile temerity to howl "Canadians, do not vomit on me!" More often she is sincere, direct, touching, with only a trace of the sentimentality of the German romantics she quotes so often. Evil is not in her world, or in men, but in their confluence; the pain and sleepless nights are not in women, or in men, but in their great need for each other. The waltz, she cautions us, is not as easy as it looks, and clumsiness is painful. But to dance like bears, off the beat, around and around--the necessary dance...