Word: scummed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...term representative from Colorado from 1971-73, but he is now chief lobbyist of the 500,000-member National Federation of Independent Businessmen. Still, McKevitt acknowledges that when an ex-member turns to lobbying, the attitude of his former colleagues changes: "It's not that they see you as scum of the earth, but it is a kind of disdain...
Scumbler's name is borrowed from the technical term for texturing over one color with another; usually he shortens it to Scum, for scum of the earth. A self-proclaimed people's painter, he roams the streets on his battered motorcycle, white beard flying, paintbox strapped on his back, searching for subjects. He relishes getting caught up fitfully in the lives of the students, prostitutes, policemen and tourists who gather around his easel. He goes where the flow carries him, down to explore unused tunnels under Paris or off to join some young Americans on an outing...
...Scum might seem more engaging and colorful if he were not so familiar: another in a long line of romantics who disdain the bourgeois "scramble for outside things like money or status," a lesser descendant of that definitive rogue-genius Gulley Jimson, hero of Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth. For a man who claims that most of his life has been "a flight from boredom," Scum has an amazing tolerance for bull-session profundities. Scarcely a page goes by without an interpolated haiku-like verse (WE WEAR OURSELVES INSIDE OUT/ TRYING TO BRING THE OUTSIDE...
...pseudonymous William Wharton, author of Birdy, Dad and A Midnight Clear, is himself an American painter who lived many years in Paris, so it is no surprise that his street scenes and descriptions of the painterly process are vividly authentic. His chapter on Scum's attempt to paint a self-portrait that would transport him out of the temporal dimension makes a stirring set piece. But his identification with his character is so complete that the novel seems to be spun from their shared fantasy fulfillment. Difficulties give way before Scum. Whatever he needs comes conveniently to hand, whether...
...think I hurt people by living," Scum maintains. "My maniacal insistence on living my own life is in itself a terrible violation of everybody else." The reader sees little of such conflict. Insofar as the other characters have any life outside of Scum's ruminations, they are as simple and warm-hearted an assortment of waifs and eccentrics as can be found anywhere this side of William Saroyan...