Word: alienates
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...water may be the turquoise Mediterranean, an ice-skimmed quarry in Vermont, the translucent waters off Bermuda, the Pacific rolling in majestic rhythm toward the shores of San Diego. Around the world and across the nation, swimmers are sinking beneath the surface to fly like angels through an alien realm. This fascinating new playground, alive with beauty and tanged with danger, belongs to the skindiver...
...mouth tasted like warm tea"). Some of Nunne's other friends are very different cups of tea, notably, a red-mopped painter named Oliver Glasp, who dilly-Dalis between nudes and Crucifixions. Wilson's defense of such characters is clearly Terence's "Nothing human is alien...
Sadistic & Sick. Less clear and distinctly alien is the rationale for Nunne's sadistic murders, all of which occur discreetly offstage. Novelist Wilson's argument is that crime is a thirst for freedom, a chance to wrest a heroic identity from a world of regimented boredom and blurring mediocrity. In a sick society, the superman becomes a monster. A trip to the morgue finally opens Gerard's eyes to the monstrosity of Nunne, but not before the reader has suffered much quasi-Nietzschean chatter to the effect that "if a man could kill all his illusions...
...reply to a question about theater criticism the actress declared that criticizing a play is difficult because theater is too spontaneous a medium, too fitting for its moment, to be thought out in an alien way later on. Critics must learn that to be kind to a play they must lash into it, she explained. The critic who praises a bad play, or even a mediocre one, she said, fails to understand the cruelty of being so kind...
...mere literary idea as the pictures of village life show it gradually taking on the clarity and internal discipline of the samurai's own lives. The final irony is that the warriors have taught peace too well. The surviving samurai are now not only no longer needed, but alien in the peaceful world of their own creation. --ALICE P. ALBRIGHT