Word: parr
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Vagueness and insubstantiality are the qualities at hand when Antonio Parr wakes up in the morning. Parr is a man in his 30s who has a small private income and has worked without delight as a teacher, a failed novelist and a junk sculptor. "I resorted as little as possible to welding," explains the hero of Frederick Buechner's ruefully funny new novel, "but used balance wherever I could or the natural capacity of one odd shape to fit somehow into or on top of or through another-entirely autobiographical, in other words-the idea being to leave...
Ellie? A chaste and timid rich girl with whom, nickel by nickel, Parr spends his time. She plays the piano in her Manhattan apartment while Parr lies on the rug listening: "It is this foot that I see most clearly, a rather generous-sized foot in a heelless brocade slipper working up and down on the soft pedal while I lie there on the floor watching it at eye-level. In answering Bebb's ad, I am sure that I was, among other things, hungry for fortissimo...
Bebb? A sleazy evangelist, the Lord's pitchman, the proprietor of an ordination-by-mail diploma mill. Parr sends Bebb the suggested love offering and becomes an ordained preacher by return post. Bebb himself appears shortly thereafter: fierce and shrewd and seedy, awash in the blood of the lamb-and in plans for beggaring the Internal Revenue Service. He is there, he says, to save Parr's soul and teach him gainful godliness...
...message was coded in amino acid chains called peptides, which are small proteins. Finally, he narrowed the search to a single peptide-consisting of a sequence of 15 amino acids-that he named scotophobin, from the Greek words for dark and fear. To check his conclusion, Ungar asked Wolfgang Parr, a University of Houston chemist, to duplicate scotophobin using only off-the-shelf chemicals. The synthetic variety differed slightly from the natural chemical produced in the brains of fear-induced rats, says Ungar, but it was still sufficiently potent to make nighttime cowards of most normal rats and mice...
WILLIAM J. PARR Columbus...