Word: samsonized
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Died. Alexander ("Samson") Zass, 75, famed circus strongman of the '20s who held a grand piano and its player from a wire clenched between his teeth, later bossed the Samson Institute of Health and Physical Culture in London; of a heart attack; in Rochford, England...
Writing with a wry, sure sense of absurdity, the author proves again that he is a superb literary entertainer. As a social satirist, Sansom is no Samson but his deft dialogue demonstrates that he can do considerable damage to the Philistines with the jawbone...
Corruption & Cure. The title figure and unlikely hero of Bloomfield's parable is a maker and seller of pornographic books and pictures, whose name is Samuels, or perhaps Samson, as is noted in files of the London police. The uncertainty reflects the book's focal paradox: Sammael is the angel of death, but Samson, as the author explains (stoutly refusing to allow himself the joys of obscurantism) means "of the sun, solar." The bookseller is subverter, protector, panderer and priest to a group of curious cripples-Julius, his bloodless, asexual young assistant; Louise, a housewife whose husband thinks...
...pornographer prompts the author to quote a passage from Mann's Doctor Faustus: "We only release, only set free. We let the lameness and self-consciousness, the chaste scruples and doubts go to the Devil." For Devil, Bloomfield adds thoughtfully, "read, if you like, 'Mr. Samson.' " Yet who is Samson? The bookseller shrouds himself in dialectic and mockery. He rails against society, and conjectures with an unreadable expression that in the "groans of disgust or cynical obscenities" uttered by buyers of his pornography, "one can hear the cry of man seeking a lost paradise." Does the Tempter...
...British fiction that he pops onstage, lines already learned, before the author has finished introducing him) threatens the pornographers, and the bookseller accepts the collective guilt of his healed cripples and goes to prison for them. Rather unnecessarily, Bloomfield has one of his characters point out the symbolism. Samson, then, is saviour, after all, and his gospel is a passage from Albert Camus: "I hate virtue that is only smugness; I hate the frightful morality of the world, and I hate it because it ends, just like absolute cynicism, in demoralizing men and keeping them from running their own lives...