Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...father's atelier. He moved to Paris with his family at the turn of the century. The death of Joan in 1908 caused him to turn in upon himself, break off his friendships with his artist friends (including the young Picasso), and enter 20 years' solitude, torpor and artistic death...
...rides out, finds the bodies, forces the lieutenant to face the murder he has done. The shock snaps the young man out of his moral torpor. The captain then gives him a narrow but viable chance to redeem himself-which is more, as subsequently appears, than the lieutenant's father once gave the captain...
...becomes catatonia. This year's Oscar awards show succeeded dismally. It was the longest ever televised, and its entertainment value fell somewhere between Jackpot Bowling and the little white blip that appears in the center of the screen after the set has been turned off. Part of the torpor is by now hereditary. What was new was the annual Oscar awards' spectacular morbidity. The night dragged on as a kind of animated obituary, part Beverly Hills and part Forest Lawn, which, it was suggested, may reflect the advancing years of many Academy members and their inevitable preoccupation with...
...govern." He grew increasingly impervious to Western influence, despite his summer visits to the royal villa at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera. By the time he took the throne in 1959, after the old King died at 74, Savang Vatthana seemed to have sunk into a torpor that could not be shaken by the fast-paced world around him. One Western diplomat, after a session with the King, said it was "like listening to a long Oriental movie dubbed in French." He is a fan of Margot Fonteyn and Italian opera, and at one recent soiree, after...
This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality...