Word: twitch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...were no front lines. Reality tended to melt into layers of unknowability. The same person could be a friend and an enemy?the smiling laundress in the morning carried a V.C. satchel charge at night. The enemy might even be a child with a basket. The ambiguity made Americans twitch. "My Lai?" says Larry Mitchell. "There were lots of My Lais...
Thirty-five yards into the grass the big lion lay, flattened out along the ground. His ears were back and his only movement was a slight twitching up and down of his long, black tail. He had turned at bay as soon as he had reached this cover and he was sick with the wound through his full belly, and weakening with the wound from his lungs that brought a thin foamy red to his mouth each time he breathed. His flanks were wet and hot and flies were on the little openings the solid bullets had made...
Faces in My Time can be read as one humiliation after another, swallowed with barely a twitch. When his fifth novel, What's Become of Waring, sells exactly 999 copies, Powell records the figure in the tone of a conscientious bookkeeper. When World War II comes and his colleague Evelyn Waugh flies off to serve as a commando in Greece, Powell goes to the War Office, enlists-and gets assigned to posts in England and Wales, where there is little to do but read Kierkegaard. When George Orwell dies, Powell is left to choose the hymns. In every Powell...
...with modernism, only more so, because we are much closer to it. Its reflexes still jerk, the severed limbs twitch; the parts are still there, but they no longer connect or function as a live whole. The modernist achievement will continue to affect culture for another century at least, because it was large, so imposing and so irrefutably convincing. But its dynamic is gone, and our relationship to it is becoming archaeological. Picasso is no longer a contemporary, or a father figure; he is a remote ancestor, who can inspire admiration but not opposition. The age of the New, like...
...craftsmanship. As a movie performer. Tomlin has every other American comedian beat--the nebbishness of Woody Allen, the manic antics of Mel Brooks, and the shrill flightiness of Goldie Hawn cannot come close. Such comics lack Tomlin's mastery of the subtle comic flourish, the slight gesture or tiny twitch that not only reveals character but grabs the Big Laugh as well...