Word: chockablock
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...till Poor Richard that Franklin hit his stride as a maker and collector of aphorisms; e.g., "After 3 days men grow weary, of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy." "Men and Melons are hard to know," "There is no little enemy." Poor Richard, of course, is also chockablock with moralistic homilies. D. H. Lawrence once carped that Franklin "made himself a list of virtues, which he trotted inside like a gray nag in a paddock." Lawrence was not the first or the last to be infuriated by Franklin's middle-class prudence; yet Franklin's maxims-many...
...reader may pay for an author's talent and get only his company. Charles Dickens is good company, but this collection of short stories, articles, sketches and short novels displays few of his virtues and almost all of his melodramatic devices. It is chockablock with phantoms, haunts, ominous coincidences, infants lowered into tiny graves to ascend as tiny angels, would-be suicides snatched back at the dark river's edge, pregnant maidens abandoned by heartless cads. This is the Dickens who wrung out Victorian soap opera's dampest hour, and posted "cry now" signs at every chapter...
...orthodox have always been a little leery of Simone Weil, and with some reason. The Notebooks, chockablock with the ritual lore of a dozen sects and faiths, show that she was deeply preoccupied with Dionysus, Osiris, Buddha and Plato as well as Christ. She applauds continually the Greek ideals of harmony, measure, proportion and order. Yet she herself burns with a passion for the Absolute, and the Hellenic "nothing in excess" is precisely the law she could not live by. Her grandeur, as well as her absurdity, it has been pointed out, is that she shares the apocalyptic vision...
...some 387 books, pamphlets and articles listed in his bibliography, Author Furnas raps the ghostly knuckles of Mrs. Stowe. Though Goodbye to Uncle Tom sometimes lapses into a footnotational frenzy of Ph.Dimensions, that rarely seems to dim a highlights' history of U.S. slavery that is chockablock with information most Americans have either forgotten or never knew...
...amount of new wheat it would accept from any farmer during the harvest season. But the harvest could not wait. In the finest autumn weather in years, giant combines cut wide swaths through fields of standing wheat, spewed out rivers of top-grade grain. Commercial elevators were soon chockablock. Farmers braced old sheds to withstand the fluid pressures of loose wheat, built new barns to hold the flood, and when all the sheds were filled, piled their wheat in amber hillocks on the ground. When the harvest was in, Canada's supply of wheat on hand stood...