Word: persons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...When did he ever attend a wake? When did he ever get out and rustle food for a poor starving family? Or raise the money for an undertaker?" In fact, Kennedy is even inept at the "Irish Switch," a maneuver that consists of vigorously shaking one person's hand while talking enthusiastically to someone else (Honey Fitz, a true artist, could pump one hand, speak to a second person, and gaze fondly at still another...
...wept, they recovered, they recalled." What is old age? "Both by its practitioners and by its observers, it is approached too rhetorically and on too sustained a note-the whine of the gnat, the organ pedal diapasoning, the boom of the bittern, are among its musical accompaniments. The old person is assumed, and often affects to be, all of a piece-disgusting, pitiful, pretentious, peevish, noble, ingratiating, moody, and so on. It is really more varied, a seductive combination of increased wisdom and decaying powers...
...their readings-aloud with sharp cries of "Merde!" One day he denounced a critic as an "excreter of ink." The critic took prompt revenge by noting that, at a subsequent first night, among those present was "the saturnine poet Paul Verlaine who gave his arm to a charming young person named Miss Rimbaud...
...money going? It was a long time before they discovered that the "Prince of Poets" was supporting three retired prostitutes named Philomene, Eugenie and Caroline, and living with each in turn. No scandal could shake the dignity of the great man, who now referred to himself in the third person, saying: "He has little left to him except his poverty, but he insists that this at least shall be respected." It was. When he stumbled home drunk, a proud gendarme escorted him, explaining to passersby: "Monsieur Verlaine has to be in that condition to write...
Miss Bingham's "Miss Thrush at Home" is a clear-cut, black and white depiction of character in the first person narrative of a hard, emotionless, bedridden old maid describing the end of a young woman's engagement. It gets to the point immediately, beginning with: "I am an old woman. I do not pretend to be anything else," and continues to the end hammering this fact home with relentless determination. Nowhere does Miss Thursh behave inconsistently, i.e., like a nice, ordinary human being. She keeps a card catalog on the emotional lives of the neighbors as her kind, simple...