Word: rigor
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...rabbit-punching infighter that the "new Nixon" had kept so firmly in control. For very different reasons, Humphrey's battle for survival also was a fascinating study. Chronically late, incorrigibly loquacious, hopelessly disorganized, the Vice President had seemed to everyone but himself to be a walking case of rigor mortis until the final stretch, when suddenly, somehow, the impassioned humanitarian soul of Humphrey began to flare through the servitor's mask he had worn for four years under Johnson...
...things are less than swinging in Gass's grey heartland, the big cities are worse: immobile with rigor mortis, "swollen and poisonous with people." Gass pulls a long face at contemporary literary fashions. "It's not surprising," he writes, "that the novelists of the slums, the cities, and the crowds, should find that sex is but a scratch to ease a tickle, that we're most human when we're sitting on the John, and that the justest image of our life is in full passage through the plumbing...
...Imam's proposal for relocating reading period shrewdly diagnoses the worst tendencies of Harvard's present lecture system. He explains why most sections are so deadly and why lectures are often a drowsy experience. But he fails, I think, to treat his own scheme with the same critical rigor he lets fall on the operating...
...intellectual process. She argues repeatedly that the photographic experience is a surface experience that cannot convey real knowledge, cannot convey real understanding. She objects to the way in which "the photographer's approach. . . is unsystematic, indeed anti-systematic." And well it may be, but systematic thinking and intellectual rigor is but one form of truth. Photography--with its episodic glimpses, its focus on a single image in a world that is blurred and rushing past--presents another form of truth, different from rational truth but also valid...
...touches one button at her throat, and rigor mortis Slithers into his pockets, making everything there--keys, pen and secret love--stand...