Word: passion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...abandoned a budding career as an English professor (he feared he would become "a bloody bore") to devote himself to publishing and writing. Though he once turned out a novel in a month for his Scholartis Press in London, he gave up fiction to make a profession of his passion: the study of words. Over five decades, he compiled 16 erudite lexicons devoted to slang, cliches and other aspects of the language; his last effort, A Dictionary of Catch Phrases (1977), contained 3,000 entries. "The Word King," as Critic Edmund Wilson dubbed him, savaged linguistic abuses (he found American...
...South bred a frenzied nationalism. Yet, indeed, even leaving aside these most powerful resemblances, which are very real and which find their origin in similar historical fountains (there should be added: an entrenched religious hegemony, authoritarian and puritanical in spirit), one discovers more superficial yet sparkling cultural correspondences: the passion for horseflesh and military titles, domination over women (along with a sulky-sly lechery), a tradition of storytelling, addiction to the blessings of firewater. And being the butt of mean jokes...
What was Harvard defending? The question needs to be asked in each generation. What were valuable truths then and now? In retrospect, truth emerged for me as much from poetic passion as from the disciplined play of science. John Finley became the sulking Achilles and wily Odysseus on the state of Sanders Theatre while Anna Freud Coolly described our unconscious lust on the third floor of Emerson Hall. Archibald MacLeish, zen-like, trying to "know" an apple balanced James Watson's discovery of the double helix. Clyde Kluckholn's exploration of Navaho culture and psyche challenged Wassily Leontieff's analysis...
...that bastard Joe McCarthy get away with destroying honest people," he said. "The one thing I can't forgive Ike for was that he didn't stand up for George Marshall when McCarthy attacked him." In retrospect, veritas was virtue as much as it was fact, passion and integrity as much as it was knowledge and beauty...
...Good Book salvage the Bad Seed? That is the question set forth in this play of raw passion and schizophrenic emotional conflict...