Word: paroxysmic
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...with the heels brought together in something just this side of a click. At this point, a Stokowski would spin showily and attack immediately. Not Solti. He turns thoughtfully, spreads his feet and shoots slitty glances around to make sure all is ready. Then, with a slashing, totally unexpected paroxysm involving every part of his body, he gives the downbeat. Throughout the performance, Solti's body language is dramatically explicit. The violins are brought in with huge lefthanded scoops to the floor. The trumpets are cued by the riveting spear of an arm and index finger. A starburst...
...landscape. There is no question of exploiting the material, either through the subtleties of patina or its inherent sense of mass; few bronzes, indeed, recall so insistently their origins as clay. They are cindery lumps of inert matter, pummeled and squashed with what appears at first to be a paroxysm of gratuitous violence. In the largest piece, Clam Digger (1972), De Kooning's love of direct action reaches the outer limits of credibility: this mud-footed golem, clumping along inside his ridged, tormented epidermis, is all gesture, assuming form in a challengingly haphazard way. De Kooning's sculptures...
...three categories that mothers were using long before child psychology became popular: difficult, slow-to-warm-up or easy. Like Clem, all difficult infants (about one in ten) react intensely to everything: instead of soft crying, an enraged howl; instead of quiet chuckles, uncontrolled laughter, sometimes ending in a paroxysm of hiccups. Eating and sleeping schedules are irregular, and everything new requires long periods of difficult adjustment. Easy children-the most numerous category-are regular in habit, sunny in mood, quick to adapt. And the slow-to-warm-ups are just that: not very active at first, rather negative...
...romantic oversimplification. Work, like everything else-socialism, democracy, love-was to Chekhov only a preconceived notion which could not renew life by itself, and which, if clung to stupidly as a panacea (no matter how elaborated), would seize the spirit, plunge it into a useless, deadening cycle of paroxysm and exhaustion, ending in the destruction of the person rather than the renovation of society. Bernard Shaw took Ania from The Cherry Orchard, renamed her Ellic Dunn, placed her in a crazy house of supine elegance and overheated, strangling dreams, and showed that Heartbreak House, or cultured, leisured Europe before...
...1930s. The name was apt. Oblomov is the hero of a 19th century Russian novel by Goncharov, and he is famed for his inability to get out of bed. The mere thought of taking any action or making any decision makes him burrow deeper under the covers in a paroxysm of inertia. Miss Guggenheim's "Oblomov'' told her that "ever since his birth he had retained a terrible memory of life in his mother's womb. He was constantly suffering from this and had awful crises, when he felt he was suffocating...