Word: spasms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...holds out a measure of hope for Blacks and "coloreds" in South Africa to again basic workplace dignity, economic parity, and eventual political justice. While these goals may be only marginally furthered by concerned American involvement. They will not be furthered at all by a fruitless and pious and spasm of divestiture by precisely those American institutions which South Africa's Nationalist government would be happiest to ignore...
...range from the erotic awakening of a honeymooning couple to the pensiveness of an old man surveying his fields and finding solace in memory. The book's third section contains more poems inspired by the tale of Sweeney. They describe the bird- man's first flight: "more sleepwalk than spasm" . . . drawing "close to pebbles and berries . . . relearning the acoustic of frost." He recalls his roosting place in a chestnut tree, characterized as "a queen in her fifties, dropping/ purses and earrings," and the highlights of an avian existence as he goes "scaling heaven/ by superstition/ drunk and happy...
Norway's gaunt and great Grete Waitz finished second, 1 min. 26 sec. late, without encouraging any discussion of her chronically creaky back. It had been in severe spasm the day before. Benoit was "too strong," said Grete, who had never before lost a marathon that she finished. By the halfway point, according to her old Norwegian saying, "the train had already left." Waitz was one of the few runners who viewed the Swiss straggler with a totally unmixed emotion: "I would have taken her right off the track. I don't like to watch that." Benoit sighed...
This is true gallows humor, bitter and funny, set in Argentina nearly ten years ago during that country's period of paramilitary repression. Left wing violence triggered a savage righ wing reaction, a protracted spasm of bloodthirstiness and fear among the police and the military. To be a professor, a student, a known reader of books, or even to be associated distantly with anyone who might be stigmatized as an intellectual, was to risk joining the "disappeared ones," which meant to be seized, bound, tortured, murdered and thrown into secret graves...
...averted however when after Sophia tells him that she no longer accepts the validity of the curse Tolchinsky claims to belong to the Yousekevitch family. The townspeople accept Leon's assertion, and after Leon's and Sophia's marriage they throw off the cause of unintelligee in a spasm of facile self-betterment. Yes, it's contrived and so, it doesn't make much sense...