Word: paled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tall and a trifle overweight. His face is an elfin caricature, the pale cheeks almost submerged under a wide mustache, the profile dominated by a prominent nose and an outthrust jaw. Yet he radiates an unmistakable air of authority, along with an infectious good humor. Working a crowd, he displays the charisma of a natural leader. Said a Gdansk woman worker after hearing him speak last week: "He is the right man at the right tune. He was able to give us hope...
...played by Robin Williams, appears to be undergoing an identity crisis far beyond the powers of spinach cure. As a result, his moral force -and he was once one of the great comic-strip exemplars of righteousness tied to a short fuse-appears sicklied o'er with the pale cast of self-absorption. The rest of the characters-excepting Swee'Pea (played by Altman's grandchild, Wesley Ivan Hurt)-are blurs of lost innocence...
...display he indicts chairs as uncomfortable and unhealthy, particularly the infant high chair ("a vicious, sado-pedagogic trap, as humiliating to a child as a leash is to a dog"). Elsewhere, he charts the sly history of the swing, which he describes in his book as "a pale copy of a onetime bold device for generating violent motion and emotion" of a sexual nature, mostly in women. He suggests that all forms of "bobbing mania," from lying in a hammock to tipping a rocking chair, may be "aquiver with racial memories of our arboreal ancestors swaying in a breeze...
...typical of Toomey that he explains more than he describes. He can be an amusing and sympathetic guide in this packaged tour de force, but readers who want true literary adventure should turn back to that great confabulator, Charles Kinbote, the deranged scholar-poet of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire...
...movies and imploring the yeomen of Tennessee to switch off their Atwater Kent radios, take down that country fiddle from the wall and scrape out an Elizabethan air. Their best poet, John Crowe Ransom, magically evoked a land where larks' tongues are never stilled, "sunlight lies like pale spread straw" and ladies of "beauty and high degree" arrange jasmine in vases, as courtly gentlemen pace the veranda. "Turn your eyes to the immoderate past," Agrarian Allen Tate advised in his best poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead...