Word: sump
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Attanasio wondered whether he could call himself Hercules. Despite his skinny arms and pathetic inability to lose weight over the course of two decades, Attanasio had always fancied himself a lifter of weights, had put in the hours in the cellar, yeah, pumping with the sump pump. His uncle and eponym, he knew, had once been on the cover of Muscle magazine. So let us follow Hercules as he travels with Arnold...
...does. The shady poetry of his similes ("I was as out of place as a tarantula on a wedding cake"), his metaphors ("the minutes went by on tip toe with their fingers to their lips"), his fadeouts ("What did it matter where you lay ... in a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep") - indicated a mind larger than the ghetto of the detective story in which it was trapped...
BEYOND the dollar storms and the sump that is Watergate, there is a bigger world, and it is coming together in a manner that brings some hope this springtime. In that world, the Richard Nixon of the long head and the calm eye resides. There, too, walks Henry Kissinger, the most remarkable presidential creation of this century. The two are trying to cement global tranquillity into permanent peace...
...episodes were filmed by a movie camera in a twelfth-floor window above the street. What the camera did not record, though, were the remarks of pedestrians buffeted by the psychologists: "Whatsa madda? Ya blind? Whyn't ya look where ya goin'? Ya crazy or sump'n?" The way Wolff sees it, such comments indicate that New Yorkers, though inured to many other inconveniences, are not tolerant of sidewalk bumping; they expect some degree of cooperation from other pedestrians in order to avert collisions...