Word: shapelessness
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...difference between a saint and an artist, they say, is that an artist knows he's a liar. Making sense out of existence is a dangerous game: the temptations of Conviction, on the one hand, and utter, shapeless Alienation, on the other, are usually seductive enough to deprive piety of content and realism of form. "Spit in a whore's face and she'll tell you it's raining," goes an old Yiddish proverb. What to do about reality seems to have become a problem of choice, and a film-maker who suspects that both documentary and story are lies...
...lift him to exile (probably in Iran). At 4:05 on a quiet morning in Amman, barely 24 hours after martial law was imposed, an artillery round shattered the predawn quiet. It was the tocsin for a barrage of fire from both sides, mostly in the dark at shapeless targets...
...Nordic superman. The closest to the true Lawrentian is Glenda Jackson, who made her reputation as Charlotte Corday in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Marat-Sade. Playing the repressed, inflammable Gudrun, she is a total re-creation of the impassioned, nearly liberated woman whose yards of shapeless clothes could not conceal her unrelieved sexual longing, and whose prudish conversation was almost always alive with allusions...
...moral or plot in the novel would be respectively prosecuted, banished or shot. It was like a carrot farmer putting up a no-trespass sign for rabbits. The book was pounced on immediately by the upholders of the well-made novel and 19th century gentility. Most critics found it shapeless, and vulgar. "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses," said Louisa May Alcott, "he had best stop writing for them." Such scoldings came despite Mark Twain's prepublication agreement to eliminate references to blasphemy, bad odors, dead cats...
...brother Jules, by contrast, is consumed by passion. In Miss Gates' intensely realistic world, he is a stunted Nietzschean hero, a drifter and petty criminal who lacks the imagination to refine love out of his shapeless longings. Yet he is not without hope. Caught up in Detroit's summer riot, Jules discovers that his best instinct is for "senseless dreamy violence." "Violence can't be singled out from an ordinary day," he tells a TV interviewer after the riot. "Everyone must live through it again and again; there's no end to it, no land...