Word: squirm
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...SOME SHOWINGS of Nashville bands of people squirm in their seats, flamboyantly discontented--sharp out-takes of impatient breath, exclamations of disgust, even boos at the end of the show. It had to come to this: it should have been obvious from the beginning that the colossal build up for Nashville would alienate people, and not just because certain aficionados consider it the height of sophistication and the mark of a properly iconoclastic sensibility to reject on principle whatever happens to be snared by the cover of Newsweek or Time...
...good Germans have to live with death camps, and the good Americans with Indochina. Stefan Kanfer in his review of Hearts and Minds [March 17] seems to squirm too much when he says it is all too simplified with too many easy shots about the uniqueness of American evil, the violence of our culture. O.K., are we ready to hang this dirtiest episode in American history on the leaders in the White House and Congress who kept it going? Who needs chronology and complexity...
...suspect that our society's flight from the Bible arises from the fact that its message makes us squirm-especially those parts about God's siding with the poor, the inept and the outcast. Proud, rich nations do not want to hear about camels and needles' eyes, suffering servants or crucified kings, but the Bible is a part of us. It lives in our language, our mental imagery and above all in our conscience, whether we like...
...personal paradox is that loneliness and elusiveness should make him so widely known to the public. Such exposure presents dangers. An art of such simplicity can be easily smoothed away into cliche, but only by the auditor. There are lines in Waiting for Godot that make you squirm now. There is the danger of reading a moral into Beckett's work, as, Alvarez points out, the Nobel prize committee did in their citation of Beckett's writing as "a Misere from all mankind." This, of course, is nonsense and it is important to remember in dealing with Beckett's work...
...cliff, young Dr. Bleagh and his nurse Ivy are relaxing after a difficult lobotomy. His scrubbed and routinized fingers dart beneath her suspender straps, pull outward, release in a sudden great smack and ho-ho-ho from Bleagh as she jumps and laughs too, trying not too hard to squirm away. They lie on a bed of faded old nautical charts, maintenance manuals, burst sandbags and spilled sand, burned matchsticks, and unraveled corktips from cigarettes long decomposed that comforted through the nights of '41 and the sudden rush of heart at any glimpse of a light...