Word: spokenness
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Douglas Elmendorf doesn't look like the kind of guy who could intimidate those at the pinnacles of power. A soft-spoken academic who coaches his daughters' soccer team, he is described by virtually everyone who knows him as a genuinely nice guy. But consider some of the things that have been said about the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and his ideas during the past year. "Off the wall," fumed Dave Obey, the famously volatile chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has suggested - and not in a nice way - that Elmendorf...
...interview with The Believer, Moore claimed that “awkwardness is where the tension is, and tension is where the story is.” If that is the case, story permeates every word of spoken dialogue in this book; dialogue that never seems to reflect what the characters mean. The novel is fraught with moments in which characters don’t quite seem to be responding to what actually has been said, creating a symphony of crossed wires...
...against a toilet, masturbates naked in a forest and mutilates her own genitals. "The film was so dramatic and so extreme that it took all my thoughts away," she says. "It helped me recover." Von Trier still struggles to reconcile her raw performance in the movie with her soft-spoken manner in person. "Privately she is so shy. You can sit through a meal with her and she doesn't say anything," he says. "How can this very, very shy person do scenes like this?" (Read a Q&A with Lars von Trier...
Salinger drew from Sherwood Anderson, Isak Dinesen, F. Scott Fitzgerald and especially Ring Lardner, whose wise-guy voice you hear chiming in the snappy banalities and sometimes desperate patter spoken by Salinger's characters, a tone that found its way years later into the neurotic chatter of Woody Allen's New Yorkers. But Salinger bent it all into something new, a tone that drew from the secular and the religious, the worldly and the otherworldly, the ecstatic and the inconsolable. It's customary to assume that the seven Glass children - the Glass family, an intricate hybrid of showbiz and spirituality...
...movies he's been an angel, an inspirational teacher and the Black Muslim icon Malcolm X. He's played soldiers, policemen, coaches, doctors. He's spoken the words of Shakespeare and Spike Lee. Even as a killer, in American Gangster, he carried himself like a cool chief executive, the mayor of the Harlem underworld. He has the gift of making melodrama seem plausible just because he's doing it. And always in Denzel Washington's screen demeanor is the sense of power withheld, of anger internalized. He doesn't shout or strut, doesn't need to. Why raise your voice...