Word: sideshow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Then the white-garbed clown gets into a harness himself, and, as he is hoisted aloft, the magician stabs him, the racist throws baseballs at him, and he is beaten by an irate sideshow barker. The cries of his death agony shatter the sound track. In a silence that follows, three empty harnesses dangle from their ropes, and the remorseful Magnus goes to put white makeup on his face. In the final scene an all-white figure is riding the donkey as the circus moves on. Is it the clown-or the puppeteer-or Everyman-or Christ...
...cerebral-so thoroughly that for a season or two, cocktail-party critics may find their tongues cleaving to the roofs of their mouths. It is also a killing parable about intellectual conformity. Most impressively, however, the book transforms a dry, decorous and essentially frivolous scene into a simmering sideshow in which a series of tiny figures, full of recognizably human venom and vulnerability, grapple cruelly with each other...
...Goodman becomes a lecturer famous for his perversities, patronized for his vulgarity and self-exposure, then his problematic personality is bound to overshadow his scholarship. Paul Goodman is too important a thinker to become another sideshow...
...siren song lures a young sailor toward destruction. He meets a girl, Mora, whose dark eyes distill the rapture of the depths. "I am a mermaid," she tells him-perhaps referring to her job, which involves slipping into a scaly fishtail and then into a tank at a boardwalk sideshow. But Mora is unfathomably fey. She collects starfish and coral. Gulls fly into her arms. She is tormented by a mysterious Woman in Black who appears with jet veils murmuring about her like sea things...
...charge, Mike Mansfield offered a kind, gentle, understanding, noble explanation of why things are slow at the Senate (everything is locked up in committees). He admitted that he himself is "dull and dreary" but insisted that he was not about to turn the Senate into a "Roman holiday or sideshow...