Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...evil fates dance faster and faster above their heads, Kozol denies Wendy her lover because, the fellow observes carefully, "how can we leave our friends?" The Harvardman recognizes "there was some kind of vicious stupidity flooding through me, rising up like a sordid ugly mist to obscure the things that were golden" and their desire dies...
...narrator is writing his apologia from a prison cell (he is to be tried for murder). As far as erotic detail is concerned, the book tells little that has not been dealt with in a lot of bestselling fiction; but where the sexy bestsellers talk about the sordid or tragic facts of life in staccato sociology, couch jargon or four-letter words, Lolita is the more shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny. It is (in many of its pages) a Medusa's head with trick paper snakes, and its punning comedy as well...
Patrick Dennis, the bearded Scheherazade with the eye for the Mame chance, has strummed out another night's entertainment. This leaves 999 nights, and so the public can probably look forward to Auntie Mame at Yale and Auntie Mame in the R.A.F., if not (unless something sordid has been withheld) Son of Auntie Mame. At any rate, there is no important difference between Auntie Mame, which sold 1,500,000 copies and Around the World. Biggest change: in the starting novel Mame Dennis gets married; in the sequel she just gets around...
...hearing room in Washington reeked with the ugly smell of shakedown, of labor hoodlums sweating behind the Fifth Amendment, of sordid fear, as testimony on the Chicago restaurant protection racket went into its second week. To the members of the Senate's labor-management investigating committee, it was quite clear that they had caught the scent of one of the dirtier trails in labor history...
This is a true--albeit sordid--story of the artistic mentality in turmoil. Names have sometimes been changed, facts occasionally exaggerated, but the pattern remains the same. Harvard's Beat Generation is attempting to survive the summer on a dollar a day--waiting for the publisher's advance, the completed symphony, or a Beacon Street-sponsored gallery exhibition. It is a long, hot, and purgative summer; and, in its way, a time of epic proportions...