Word: scabrously
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...state. From 1904 to 1911 he mocked society by making his living as an editor of a pornographic series called The Masters of Love, by pamphleteering for any new form of poetry or painting that turned up, by sprinkling his three volumes of poetry and various phantasmagoric novels with scabrous puns and salacious posturings. But when the war began, he enlisted in the army-which he did not have to do as a foreigner-and proved a tough and durable soldier until he was hit in the head by shrapnel. He won a measure of respectability, French citizenship...
...other playwright can quite match Genet at holding the audience at bay, taut between open distaste and hypnotic fascination. Even so, Genet as artist is still much smaller in scale than Genet as existentialist hero. Much of his autobiographical writing is so sleazily scabrous that it loses even shock value. On the stage, his imagination sometimes runs to episodes so melodramatically contrived that they miss theatrical effectiveness, as when the revolutionary leader in The Balcony emasculates himself onstage...
Ancient Surfaces. A great borrower and transplanter, he confesses that he often takes a detail of a building here and adds it to another there. In all his paintings there is a loving treatment of ancient surfaces: tattered plaster, ravaged brick, gnarled woodwork, scabrous paint bespeak his affection for old, well-used places and things. But sometimes Sivard gets so carried away in his kindly lampoons that there is a detail too many, and the end result is no better than a merely slick magazine cover. His most impressive paintings are from that unpainted and usually humorless terrain, Russia, which...
...underlying Daumier's Gens de Justice and countless other examples of esprit gaulois from Mantre Pathelin to the present. La Brige, harassed hero of several Courteline comedies, finds himself at odds with Justice for violation of the article in the Civil Code forbidding indecent exposure. But this is no scabrous little burlesque of the type so common during the period, meant to titillate the lubricious instincts of the week-end visitor to Paris from the other side of the Channel or Rhine. If La Brige reveals a Chaucerian part of his anatomy to 13,687 passers-by, it is through...
...London festival. Diamond tiaras twinkled in the well-Established audience on hand to see an "entertainment" on the City's history by Poet John Betjeman, assisted by Sir John Gielgud and 74-year-old Comedian Randolph Sutton. Toward the end, Sutton broke out in an old, faintly scabrous music-hall ditty, and invited the audience to sing along. High sheriffs shuffled, bankers balked, field marshals fidgeted. Then a strong, clear voice rose from the austere assemblage. And as Queen Elizabeth was heard, all joined...