Word: byronic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gospel of wood power has yet to reach suburban Weston, Conn., 170 miles closer to the equator. But one resident, TIME Associate Editor Christopher Byron, is an ardent stoveowning votary. Byron, whose guide to new heat-saving gadgets accompanies Skew's story, has two wood stoves in his home. He adds: "I have fitted the house with every form of insulation and heat-saving device short of an IBM 370 to run the furnace." Among them: storm windows, weather stripping, a new DOUG BRUCE fuel-efficient oil furnace and a clock-timer thermostat that shuts off the furnace...
...twelve Justices portrayed in the book, Burger receives the harshest verdict. He is limned as a vain and petty man who consistently tries to bend or ignore the court's rules in order to get his way. His frequent vote switching exasperates his colleagues: after one flipflop, Justice Byron White threw his pencil on the conference table and shouted, "Jesus Christ, here we go again!" The chief is portrayed as a legal lightweight whose opinions are shoddy and poorly thought out. Of one Burger opinion dealing with court-ordered school busing in Detroit, Justice Lewis Powell is quoted...
...apartment, while Henny's on the operating table, they spill out their tribulations and prayers. Their idiocyncrasies, it seems, know no bounds; as well as Dr. James, they share an unquenchable thirst for books. They talk in allusion, carry old volumes everywhere, and make love while reciting from yellowed Byron, cut just for the occasion. At least, they're about to, they're about to, when the phone rings. It's Valerie, the girl Scooper's escorting to Haiti...
...this which takes up about 45 minutes, is funny, But it's abruptly interrupted by Scooper's semi-Oedipal urge to call his ailing mother at Presbyterian. They put him on hold, and at this point he loses it. He hurls the Byron the lovers once caressed about the apartment, with all her precious books. Insanity, it seems, is contagious: she grabs a letter opener and stabs him. From here, the scene changes to the hospital where he and his mother spend an hour and a half rehashing their unimaginative pasts, their guilt, their dreams. He even has a Rosebud...
Libertine, blasphemer, aristocratic scapegrace, eternal anarchist, the Don Juan of legend still enthralls and disturbs the Western consciousness. He is a figure of mythic proportions, larger than the countless works of art that have tried to contain him, from Moliere and Goldoni through Byron and Shaw. The fascination of his enigmatic psychology is apparently inexhaustible. He has been seen as a Punch-like comic character; as a tragic hero, or Nietzschean rebel against God; as a walking textbook of sexual pathology. He survives all interpretations. He will survive even this one: an opulent but confused and wrongheaded adaptation...