Word: spined
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...film also leaves many questions unnecessarily unanswered. How did Merrick learn to read? What happened to Merrick's mother? Why is his spine deformed? The answers (not given in the movie): he was taught to read in the workhouse where his mother sent him, age 3, because she couldn't stand the sight of him. His back was crippled in a workhouse accident. Are these answers so difficult in a film purportedly telling us the truth about The Elephant...
...then chops at this wooden monument like a pecking bird. He hunts for seedy answers to those pregnant questions only poets ask. He wants to know who we are, where we have come from, what we look like to ourselves. He whirls in a magical helix around America's spine and in the end he finds that America has no spine, that the loons and the lake are a mirage, that the Appalachian Trail leads nowhere...
...that supposed landmark of realism, he finds to be a tissue of implausibilities (although he adds that they do not matter). Above all, he continually exhorts the reader to look for his own angles, to read "not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle." Of the three guises that he says any great writer assumes-storyteller, teacher, enchanter-he leaves no doubt about which he venerates...
Belmont is a small neighborhood, but along the full length of the South Bronx lies its commercial and cultural spine. The Grand Concourse was built at the turn of the century as a speedway for the Rider and Driver Club of New York. By World War II, however, the Concourse was a fully developed residential strip containing the greatest collection of Art-Deco buildings in the United States. It was a street attracting people from all over New York, the home of the wealthy and influential leaders of the Bronx...
...prince was psyched out by Alexeyev the last time they met, and he will have none of Alexeyev's flattering words this time. But Alexeyev is in no position to trouble other opponents; he has problems of his own. He has lost some of the flexibility of the spine required in the snatch, in which a man must bend deep and sweep the bar overhead in a single, flowing motion. He also seems slower today, getting under the bar late and, sometimes, not getting there at all. He starts to sweat profusely as he warms up, a bad sign...