Word: shams
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...nuclear dance macabre. The President had announced, after the Soviet resumption last September, that this country would prepare to test, allow some time to capitalize on world opinion, and then decide whether to follow suit. The negotiations and crises de conscience that followed now appear to have been sham...
...farm he used to dream of so longingly that Larry nicknamed him "the plowboy"? Where is the child whom Albert named after Larry? Between them, husband and wife desolate the visitor with unsparing revelations. The farm was bought and bankrupted. The marriage is a sterile sham punctuated with joyless infidelities. And when the play at length gives away its key secret, the monstrous lot of the child, Larry's disillusionment is complete, for it turns out that he is dying of his old wounds and wanted to assure himself that saving Albert was not for nothing. At play...
...hour and a half his voice loses its urgency, let alone its audibility. And Genet, for all his violence and class-consciousness, for all his loud identification with the poor, black, female, criminal, perverted oppressed underdog, is a thoroughly non-Revolutionary playwright. To him, all change is sham (as in the Balcony where the victorious insurrectionaries return to the brothel with a set of illusions sicker than those of the ousted eminences). Genet's underdogs do not want to seize the world and change it; they only want to reverse its order. His Blacks want to oppress the whites...
...faithfully translated and copiously annotated as they are, these letters explain everything about Beethoven except his music. "Beethoven's letters are full of sham rhetoric, so obviously sincere," writes Biographer Alan Pryce-Jones. "He never learned to use words, let alone spell them, and scarcely troubled to attach more than an oblique meaning to them . . . He ran no risk of disseminating his feelings in the ordinary intercourse of humanity." Even while Beethoven was composing his finest works-the last quartets-his letters were concerned only with servants, publishers and nephew. Whence came the soaring grandeur and philosophic calm that...
Into this sham-fest the playwright throws a rich young Yaleman, full of boola, moola and ideals, trying to pursue an honest artistic career. Along the way, he is buffeted by a whipcracking female magazine publisher (Lahr), a Hollywood producer named Harry Hubris (Lahr), and his own father, Milo Leotard Allardyce DuPlessis Weatherwax (also Lahr), a wild Park Avenue lecher. When his son admits a literary interest in the exotic sins suggested by Lolita and the works of Oscar Wilde, Weatherwax bellows encouragingly: "That's the stuff to cut your eyeteeth on. You have to learn to crawl before...