Word: sensualism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gioconda Smile" used a murder incident merely as vehicle to carry the usual Huxleyan theme that lives not lived on both the sensual and rational level fall short of fulfillment. As a result the characters were not rounded, but rather each represented a perversion from Huxley's "golden mean." To develop the movie out of such a story it became necessary to make al the characters just a bit more human than they had been originally. Thus the film lost some of the story's meaning as the murder plot became an end in itself...
...common chord struck in all the stories-sex not as sensual experience but as a disturbing drive that leads people to behavior they can hardly control and but dimly understand. In one beautiful tale, The Babes in the Wood, O'Connor enters the shadow-world of painfully solemn, almost preternatural children who suffer from their elders' illicit affairs. O'Connor's bitterest stories are implicit denunciations of the sexual attitudes-or lack of them-of the prim, provincial and pious sort of Irishwoman. When a husband, desperately annoyed with his wife's unwifely reliance...
...Congressman, had an eye for the female form. (Excerpts from his diary: Miss Frazier "has what is called a genteel shape"; Miss Cazneau "has nothing in her person to recommend her but a very good shape. . . . Mrs. Jones . . . exhibited an arm . . . which might fire the imagination of a sensual voluptuary...
...attributing of sensual or spiritual qualities to music itself is an arbitrary thing indeed. Since extreme religiosity is a diversion of sensuality, it seems not unsuitable that so-called sensuous music be used as a means of stimulating religious fervor. But music itself has no real erotic influence on human beings other than that created by association...
...They muttered sagely to each other "terrific mood, terrific content" as the Duke played such originals as The Mooche, Mood Indigo and Black and Tan Fantasy. The New Orleans jazz boys were then spreading a simple, primitive and powerful music; but the Duke was talking a new pulsing and sensual language. He had not yet heard of Stravinsky, and he had quit studying harmony after his first lesson, but he was using dissonance and rhythm, and thick, murky six-and eight-tone cluster chords in ways that were not recommended in the harmony books...