Word: primal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...shrill, derisive, but continuingly provocative. The Symbolic Meaning, a collection of earlier versions of the same essays, is considerably calmer in tone, but both versions bear the unmistakable stamp of Lawrence's chaotic, irascible mind. He saw the underlying theme of U.S. literature as the "disintegration of the primal self." "On the top it is nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey. Like Hawthorne being such a blue-eyed darling, in life, and Longfellow and the rest such sucking doves." Underneath, "serpents they were." James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels may read like adventure stories, but they...
...which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. . . . My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part...
...Primal Gloom. He can drink almost anyone under the table too. When Burton's emotional life was particularly eruptive one day earlier this month, he drank half a gallon of cognac, being careful not to let it interfere with his work before the cameras in a new picture called The VIPs. His heroes are Scofield, Olivier, Gielgud, Alec Guinness?and a Lancastrian he once met who could down twelve pints of beer while Big Ben was announcing midnight. "I am one of the few people I know," says Burton, "who drinks only when he works." And this is true. Between...
Only Sprocket Holes. Stevens made Shane, too. deliberately including every major cliche of the oater: cattlemen v. sodbusters, gunfighters out of nowhere, a funeral, a Fourth of July party. Stevens found under each cliche its root truth as a primal element of life on the range, turning what could have been a routine buttermilker into one of the greatest westerns ever told...
...delight in his new finery. Swifter than thought, the mood changes, and the robes seem transformed into the priestly vestments of a man taking holy orders. Later, raising his slight, shattered body from the floor after sexual violation, Mills utters a howl which in its compressed agony echoes the primal curse of man. Robbed of all self-regard, his face whitens to despair as if it were daubed in the ashes of a cremated soul...