Word: torpor
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...some readers, at least, Manuel the Mexican will be a memorable tour de force. Novelist Coccioli is able to evoke the "malicious torpor" of the bizarre Mexican scene more brilliantly than anyone since Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, which was the story of a man to whom drink was a religion. Coccioli succeeds in the more difficult story of a man intoxicated by God. His complicated moral seems to be that sanctity is inviolable, that revelation is continuous, that time present is time past, and that, whether or not Christ is also the Lord Tepozteco, it is unarguable...
First, he proved to be a relative rarity among high school art teachers-an able artist. Said one student: "We never had an art teacher who could really draw before." Next, he roused the slow learners in his math course from their vegetable torpor. His method: "I told them that they had to work hard because in order for me to feel a dignity in my work I had to accomplish something, and that something was to teach them math. I said I was very interested in not wasting my time. At first they didn't believe me. They...
...Michener got around to mentioning the issue that makes Southeast Asia's present crucial to the U.S. future-i.e., the Communists and the West are both struggling to win the region to their side. In all, NBC cameramen shot 16 hours of film for the show; the torpor of the editing and narration created the unhappy illusion that...
...lubricating oils. What they have sent has often proved inferior, e.g., low-quality newsprint that tears in Cairo's high-speed Western presses. Cracked a Cairo editor: "Pravda must go to press at 6 o'clock at night." The domestic economy twitches along in austerity and torpor, with tea and sugar scarcely obtainable except at black-market prices, and the regime invoking military law in an effort to force butchers to sell meat at new, government-set prices. The price of kerosene, essential for cooking and lighting in the fellah's household, is up 10% since last...
Like a vacationer stretched out in a hammock, the economy took its ease while the experts debated the future. Is it suffering merely from a seasonal lack of energy, or from a torpor that will last beyond the dog days of summer? Said New York's Guaranty Trust Co.: "The widespread expectation of an upturn in business this autumn is in some measure the product of hope rather than of tangible signs of rising activity." Guaranty's reasons: "Consumer caution" and a lack of "buoyancy in business operations." The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago also reported "less than...