Word: torpor
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...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...
...poetry right on the stump. Barred these three years from the government's councils by the jealous Nacionalistas, Vice President Macapagal has had little to do but recite an occasional poem in the boondocks, cultivate his excellent relations with the Americans, denounce the Garcia administration for venality and torpor, and impatiently await the Liberal hour. Now he proclaims himself the spokesman of "a new generation" in the style of John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. "Our people want change," he cried in his acceptance speech last week. "We shall open a new era that will bring...
...promises, and the baseless accusations at the opposition that the tolerant convention watcher has learned to expect. It reflects at the same time something of which many of the delegates to Los Angeles may not entirely have been aware: the genuine dissatisfaction of their party's intellectuals with the torpor in their society...
Stirred out of their torpor, the boys leaped to Hanners' challenge. Said he: "Sometimes they write a paper for me without my asking...