Word: shrills
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...absurdists have heeded the admonition of their existential idol Kierkegaard, who wrote: "The comic spirit is not wild or vehement, its laughter is not shrill." Black humor has a long tradition that reached its apex in Jonathan Swift. But the humorists who dwell on death and disaster today lean too often toward the narcissistic, reflecting images of themselves as helpless heroes in a world they can neither take nor leave. Their less lugubrious colleagues, on the other hand, have been all too willing to cede the comic to the journalists and to allow the commercial to override the classic...
...strikes against the North had endangered the success of the war or needlessly cost allied lives. In deciding to resume bombing, the President had to weigh the risk that North Viet Nam would respond in kind and that Red China might even be jolted into making good its shrill threats of intervention...
...film is flawed by oversimplification and contrivance, for the script makes Colin's latent homosexuality more credible than his unsuspecting innocence. And the dice are conveniently loaded against marital sex, since Actress Tushingham's shrill, seriocomic strumpet is written and played in a manner guaranteed to subdue passion in any red-blooded youth. Most of the time, however, the characters in Leather Boys seem stronger than the pat fiction imposed upon them. In the hands of Director Furie and his exuberantly wayward cast, their lives unreel with a moment-to-moment immediacy that is funny, fascinating and human...
...fund raiser: silver-tongued Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir. Publicity director: equally eloquent Deputy Premier Abba Eban, former Ambassador to the United Nations. Eshkol himself campaigned as the candidate of unity and stability, asked only for "four years of quiet to work," and pleasantly referred to Ben-Gurion's shrill taunts as "our little rupture in Mapai." On election day, the Mapai mobilized 60,000 "volunteers" to get out the vote with bus and taxi, scheduled flights from the Red Sea to enable Tel Aviv vaca tioners to get home and cast their ballots...
Quiet as Hell. Did the arrest presage a new cultural crackdown? So far, the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime has taken a moderate approach to intellectuals, avoiding the shrill, savage attacks of the Khrushchev era. Khrushchev's cultural hatchet man, Leonid Ilyichev, has been removed; Stalin's pet geneticist, Trofim Lysenko, has been disavowed by Russian science; imaginative and critical writing appears frequently in Soviet publications so long as it remains within limits. More importantly, B. & K. seem to recognize the sheer public-relations value inherent in "liberalization." Says one Washington Kremlin-watcher: "These men would like to handle this...