Word: wail
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...worst offenders are the eight women in the chorus. they plod like cows and wail like banshees. Eliot wrote lengthy parts for the chorus, to make it the passive, fearful substratum of the play, somewhere between mankind and nature. Its members understand even less than the audience what's happening to Becket, but they too participate in a small way in the miracle of Becket's martyrdom and learn something as the play progresses. You wouldn't know it from the actresses at Currier, who maintain the same unbearable level of high-pitched, uncomprehending moaning from start to finish--until...
Kabul does retain some scraps of its former character. Donkeys laden with wicker panniers of fruit plod along the muddy side streets. Women beggars, their faces concealed completely by hoods with mesh eye holes, wail for baksheesh outside rug stores. Turbaned tribesmen from the mountains stride along shouldering huge bundles. Boys offer sticks of lamb shashlik grilled over charcoal at street corners. Outside moviehouses there are garish posters of Afghan-made westerns in which ersatz Omar Sharifs twirl six-shooters in each hand. But the cinemas are open only in the afternoons, and ticket sales are slow because...
...bizarre reggaed polka, dreadlocks and kielbasa, an "industrial squeeze" that "looks like a luxury,/Feels like a disease." This is Modern Man bombarded by machines, crying for the human touch as he vocally ascends the scale to keep from being swallowed, and succumbs with a heart-rending wail. The song is followed slam-bang by "Beaten To the Punch," in which Elvis races to keep up with the noisy, busy instruments, seizing opportunities before everyone else, and discovering, as he goes under with a shriek, that he has become a prisoner of his choices...
Clearly, the U.S. is now buffeted by a public atmosphere that has grown chronically and pervasively cautionary. Apprehensive outcries wail forth from broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, posters, labels, environmental journals, medical tracts, Government reports, even books. One of the books is a brand-new broadside by Dr. Charles T. McGee, a clinical ecologist of Alamo, Calif., who is quoted above. His 220-page polemic issues a general alarm about multifarious dangers that lurk in every nook and cranny of contemporary civilization. Even fluorescent lighting, he says, may, in some weird way, weaken the muscles. The book, billed as a "crash course...
ENOUGH OF SUBSTANCE: Lamont's style evolved from years of writing for that most homogenized of magazines, Time. Campus Shock is a Time cover story filled with water and wood pulp, a distended magazine article--the very titles wail with the self-justifying banshee pitch of the media-hyped Big Story: "Campus Shock," "Sexual Anarchy," "Grade Frenzy." And the vignettes, written in the best lurid style of not even Time, but True Detective...