Word: witting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL, by Kenneth Rexroth. A novel it is not, but it is a novel autobiography of an old bohemian, who describes with much wit and some wisdom the anarchists, pacifists, ragged Utopians and ordinary cranks he encountered during a freewheeling life...
Lady Who? A reasonable question, for the world has almost forgotten the greatest Englishwoman of the 18th century. Her beauty was the cynosure, her wit the terror, her private life the puzzlement of Hanoverian London. She was the confidante of one Prime Minister (Walpole) and the mother-in-law of another (Bute). She introduced smallpox vaccination to Europe. She rivaled Pope as a satiric versifier, dazzled Addison and Steele as an essayist. Above all she was acclaimed, by Dr. Johnson himself, as the greatest of the great letter writers of 18th century England...
...bathroom. Even caustic Cartoonist Jules Feiffer says: "It's astounding what's allowable today." The gentle comedies that once titillated the town have been replaced by such farces as What's New Pussycat? and Kiss Me, Stupid, in which playboyesque exaggeration has been substituted for wit. Contemporary audiences are largely unshockable; to build up enough pressure to get a laugh, humorists have begun to abandon sex to take up the grave topic of death, as in The Loved One, proudly promoted as a picture "with something to offend everyone." Yet audiences have generally proved shockproof to spoofs...
Patrick White is such a confident contortionist. His double-spiraled mandala is the Hindu symbol of totality embedded in a glass marble, and his vast pretension is to spin out this bauble to encompass all human life in the person of its owner-an Australian half-wit half-man living in a suburb of Sydney...
However, there can be too much directorial control and some players seem content merely to don the assorted masks that Carnovsky parcelled out. This foible seemed the particular property of the villains. Matt Conley in the most unkindest role of all, the bastard Edmund, exercised enough wit and restraint to stay this side of melodrama. But Regan (Phoebe Brand) and Goneril (Ludi Claire) ranted and raved, groaned and grimaced. Robert Benedict's Oswald was arch and despicable, Nick Smith's Cornwall took appropriate relish in kicking out Gloucester's eyes; these actors' evil was far too lunatic to be cruel...