Word: underworlders
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...myth about the slum brat who makes it big in the underworld is curlicued with familiar movie romance. Clearly, Joseph Vincent Moriarty, who grew up in a rundown section of Jersey City, N.J., never had romance in his soul-or never saw the right movies. Known as "Newsboy" because in his youth he sold tabloids in the bars and restaurants of his neighborhood, Moriarty got into the policy numbers racket* when he was only 13, went on and upward to become Jersey City's No. 1 numbers boss. He was arrested no fewer than 25 times on gambling charges...
...starts telephone conversations with "It's your dime, start talking," ends them without warning, on a grunt and a click. Brazen and tough, he has been arrested 19 times since 1950, convicted twice (armed robbery, assaulting a police officer), spent a total of three years in prison. His underworld connections are notorious: he worked as a head-knocking labor goon for St. Louis Hoodlum John Vitale, and his boxing career was supervised by stooges of Ganglord Frankie Carbo...
...last Juliette returns, after a week on the land during which she met only mountebanks, cripples and beggars. Like Persephone coming back from the underworld, she rejoins the crew of L'Atalante; she has come to her own milieu, which now seems more real, larger and more natural than the mist-hidden landscape of the riverbanks that glide so swiftly...
...Coffin Texts," explains Bruinsma, "are literature for death. They were given to the dead to take along on their trip into the underworld." The earlier but better-known Pyramid Texts, which were written on the monumental tombs built for pharaohs in the latter part of the Old Kingdom (2980-2275 B.C.), contain the first known written record that man believed in a life after death. The Coffin Texts, which were composed for the tombs of noblemen rather than kings, express a more complicated insight: that man in the next world will be rewarded for his good acts and punished...
...part of life that he would redeem. Miller has a great and wonderfully positive enjoyment of the senses, but he is unlike his characters who try to use sex as a narcotic. He wants to redeem degraded sex, too, to encompass the dank and foul-smelling underworld of existence into his vision, and to draw forth whatever ecstasy can be found even there. His sympathy extends to all of human life; even what he hates must be redeemed...