Word: torpor
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...Connection is all about drug addicts, and it has a sporadic, hypodermic sort of distinction. The junkies sit in a pad impatiently waiting, but for nothing so vague as Godot: they wait for their "connection" and the heroin he will bring. They numb the hall with torpor, draw beads on the audience with four-letter words, pick their eyes, ears, nails and noses, and squeeze the "green stuff" out of a boil on one man's neck. They trade hip remarks: "I don't have any marijuana, but how quaint of you to ask." Says a Negro junky...
What Thou Wilt. Apart from Mamma's quirks, Havelock's boyhood in Surrey was uneventful to the point of torpor. The boy was a bookworm; the man would be a cultural boa constrictor gorged with print. He had four sisters and an absentee sea-captain father; Ellis would be woman-handled most of his life. Papa interrupted his son's reading twice, once to take him around the world at the age of seven, and a second time at 16, to deposit him in Australia for a four-year stretch of school-mastering in the rough...
None of this is dazzlingly new; Kafka clearly is a grandfather of the movement, and Sartre and Camus are at least unacknowledged uncles. New Realism's most important idea is to show life scrubbed clean of theatricality, and in the novel's present period of torpor, the Paris insurrection cannot be ignored. Among the latest New Realism imports...
SHOCK THEATER-"The title tells all. Many of the viewers are children who follow the show in a state of fascination and torpor. What is the purpose of this thing, anyway-to make us wake up screaming...
With the appearance of Mountolive, sex and sadness recede before the powerful thrust of politics. Many of the riddles posed in the earlier books get new answers. Pursewarden kills himself not from spiritual torpor but in expiation of a political blunder. Justine's fevered racing from bed to bed is shown to be patriotism, not nymphomania, for she and Nessim are smuggling arms into Palestine. Nessim believes that only the creation of a strong Jewish state will save the isolated minorities of the Middle East-Copts, Greeks, Armenians, Jews-from "being gradually engulfed by the Arab tide...