Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Normal Torpor. By week's end Iraq seemed settling down into the normal torpor of an Arab state after a coup d'état. Oil flowed uninterruptedly through the pipelines to the Mediterranean. Shops, schools, and government offices reopened. The curfew was gradually extended from 3 in the afternoon until 11 at night, and in the coffeehouses men were gossiping and playing backgammon...
...Awards, is probably Quinn's best picture. As a punched-out prizefighter, croaking in the high voice of a man who has taken too many on the windpipe, he manages to make the swollen-featured, illiterate pug touchingly appealing. While making the picture. Quinn stood around in seeming torpor for long stretches be tween takes, to the amazement of Fellow Actor Jackie Gleason. Says Quinn defensively: "I can't turn it on and off. Gleason plucks it off the tree and eats it raw. I have to marinate it. It comes very hard...
...fault is partly man's own, as Kafka sees it, because the lonely life is a breeding ground for new and universal crimes: torpor, mediocrity, the avoidance of the dare of love. In The Trial, the absolute appears as The Law; in The Castle, as the warder who never appears; in Amerika, as a promise extended but never fulfilled. The bitter loneliness Kafka suffered, Politzer says, was in quest for "the hope beyond hopelessness,'' "the glimmer of light Kafka knew existed...
...that even admiring contemporaries could not explain away. Henry Adams, writing a delicately equivocal notice of an early Howells novel (one of the pleasures of a collection of criticism is seeing eminent men of the past weasel out of tight places as shamelessly as critics of today), hints at torpor by remarking that the author must certainly have had feminine help in constructing so dainty a work. An anonymous English critic finds "a gentle current of interest" running through Howells' work, although he admits to an uncontrollable urge to kick the author's virtuous heroes. An American lady...
...were running out, he answered his own question as to what Fascism was all about: "One could call it irrationalism." But the irrational leads to boredom when it does not also lead to crime. All the frenetic posturing of Fascism led to Mussolini's last desperate apathy-almost torpor-and his meat-shop death. Mussolini's articulate explorations of his own dilemma give an awful fascination to Hibbert's history. In the end, it makes it possible to pity the Fascist dictator in a way that no one has ever pitied Hitler...