Word: waif
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...vast cult would develop, necrophilic and worshipful, similar to the one that lengthened the notoriety of James Dean. But the cult of Marilyn has turned out to be more esoteric. Her memory is tended by the somewhat-intellectuals. And the theme of their compassionate communions is a touching waif who was destroyed by a cruel world she never made...
...Bontecou, a blonde loft-waif of Lower Manhattan, used to do terra-cotta animals, turned to something called "soot drawings" while on a Fulbright in Rome, five years ago started making little boxes of metal rods with canvas sides stitched on with copper wire, treated with sizing for tautness, scorched with a blowtorch for blackness. From there, the elaborate wall structures grew. "I wanted to get sculpture off the floor-sculptures standing on the floor, they don't have anything to do with anything; they're so heavy and, well, I just wanted to get them...
Director Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim), a prime mover of the New Wave, exploits his star's Chaplinesque lost-waif charm, but Aznavour lacks the clownish resilience that enabled Chaplin's eternal tramp to give as good as he took from life. A hero who falls to his defeat generates dramatic interest; but the piano player seems to wallow in the complacency of his own despair, as if he were past caring and past caring about. Truffaut's centrifugal direction sends pieces of crime thriller, love story, and psychological case study flying off at unrelated tangents. Moreover...
...looks of a spirited waif. She plays one in Honey-a little urchin abandoned by her mother and by a Negro sailor who has left her pregnant, later befriended by a pale, homosexual boy who prepares her for motherhood. She is freckled and mousy, with wide-spreading lips and eyes the size of deep-summer plums. But she is an actress, not a slum kitten picked up for verisimilitude...
...only significant aspect of 1601 is the date of its composition. For it was in the summer of 1876 that Mark Twain's rage against the restrictions of polite English reached its historic climax: he began work on a novel written entirely in the vernacular of an ignorant river waif. Fed up with literary lies, he wanted Huck Finn to speak not like boys in other books, but exactly the way a boy brought up in the tanyards of Hannibal, Missouri, in the 1840's would have spoken. Yet at the very heart of his determination to be true...