Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...raised a family but for his damning insecurities, Tully finds no personal tranquillity. He moves from job to job: tops onions and sacks nuts, hoes tomato fields with Negro migrants whose silent endurance confounds and defeats him. At the end of his labors, he is no farther from torpor than when he started. The Stockton park even cuts down the shade trees under which laborers sleep in the evening heat. With irony too strong to be humorous, Tully comes closest to nature while watching a nudist colony skin-flick in a half-filled burlesque hall; by story...
...truth comes out shortly after Rivers returns to the Midwest to give a lecture. He stumbles off the stage in a drunken torpor, bashes his head and ends up recuperating in his old room at Mrs. Wallop's. She not only takes very effective charge of Rivers' recovery but also manages his love life and press relations. He in turn tells her that the harpy of his novel is really meant to be his own mother...
...institution, declared that drugs are used to keep patients in line. According to Bukovsky, a Soviet drug called Sulfazin, which induces fever and temperature, is administered as a punishment, while one called Aminazin, which causes stomach cramps as a side effect, is given to bring about a state of torpor. Soviet intellectuals estimate that some 250 Soviet citizens are being held in Russian asylums purely for political reasons...
...convincingly portray a demi-atlas and a serpent. Gordon Snyder as Antony was the less auspicious failure, while Susan Yakutis, charged with the greatest woman's role in drama, seemed more afraid than madequate. Snyder lapsed into manneristic anger, often indulging in worthless shouting; Miss Yakutis lapsed into the torpor rather than the lightning of a serpent, and was manneristic in her fire. Neither penetrated to the fire of the heroic ardor of will, the incandescent poignancy of love. A line shouted is a line destroyed. Neither actor was able to go beyond the lines to the poetry...