Word: waif
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...Carruth was) a poet, editor, and a nihilist who thinks that "1 must be really half dead" but is not particularly disturbed by the fact: most of contemporary America, he implies, is in pretty much the same shape. The agent of his undoing is a World War II French waif, Charley Dupont, who "was born in Europe's misery and came to America in his youth, imbued with the irony of hope." Dupont bears a disturbing message: "It's okay to believe," and the grail he seeks is simply citizenship papers...
...ideal human life, wrote Santayana, is an "evolution of a given seed toward its perfect manifestation." Most of Santayana's acquaintances failed to evolve, and this book is a record of their defeats: portraits etched in acid and affection. There was the romantic poet Lionel Johnson, "a spiritual waif who couldn't endure the truth, but demanded a lovelier fiction to revel in, invented, or accepted it, and called it revelation." There was the "brilliant genius" Bertrand Russell, who suffered from "a microscopic intensity that narrowed each of his insights, lost the substance in the visible image...
...doesn't have to work a wiggle for it. It's all part of a $1,000,000 movie contract that she signed with Howard Hughes in 1955. Hughes is out of the movies now, and Jane keeps busy running the Women's Adoption International Fund (WAIF), which has placed 11,000 homeless children since she founded it in 1954. But once in a while she slips back into harness. And she has not lost much of the old (38-24-36) Outlaw oomph. Poured into a gown for a three-week engagement in Las Vegas with...
...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...