Word: wanton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...clear that Walker Percy had emerged as the first major Southern voice in 30 years entirely free of the Faulknerian inflection. That in itself was good news. Yet the particular glories of the book were a tone of voice that combined modern dryness and irony with an almost wanton tenderness, and a languid young hero who drifted from years of daydreaming about love to a gradual awareness of the real thing. Percy's second novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), was also about a vague young man, this one afflicted with occasional amnesia...
This Carmen is scarcely voluptuous. Rather, she is a kind of molting puma, long in claw and tooth, snarling at a world that is not to her liking. Wanton she may be, but she gets no joy out of it; her eye is out for the main chance, for social advancement rather than sexual gratification. Her quarrel with the overseer of the cigarette factory ends in no mere slap; she tears the poor creature's bodice and carves a bloody cross on her back. Her seduction of Don José is more challenge than submission, and when he ultimately...
...persuasively attack the University for complicity in imperialism at home and abroad because the University has instrumentalized itself. It has said that moral judgments are irrelevant, that research is value-free, that the wanton slaughter of Orientals is less important than the niceties of free speech. Such is the sickness of "pure rationality." The University produces Walt Rostows. Henry Kissingers, McGeorge Bundys. It can carry on its affairs with a president who refuses to see undergraduates, and a dean who blithely and automatically reduces emotionally-charged issues such as equal sex admissions to an abstract discussion of "relative pain levels...
...Intercontinental and a dozen Chinese restaurants ^ that few of its 1,500,000 people could afford. Now, IP in many ways, it has become a city of the dead. A month after the army struck, unleashing tank guns and automatic weapons against largely unarmed civilians in 34 hours of wanton slaughter, Dacca is still shocked and shuttered, its remaining inhabitants living in terror under the grip of army control. The exact toll will never be known, but probably more than 10,000 were killed in Dacca alone...
...time, nostalgia will dim or even erase memories of assassinations, wars, racial hatred and student riots from its vision of the '60s, just as it has long since done away with the slime, the stench and the wanton slaughter of that noblest of human conflicts, World War I. Nostalgia is like Marie Antoinette, who commissioned the finest artists and architects of France to build eight picturesque peasant farms beside her Petit Trianon. They were perfect-right down to porcelain vases from Sevres used for milking the cows. Nostalgia selects only what is agreeable, and even that it distorts...