Word: hellishness
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...almost two weeks while the FBI seized our toll call records for months back and learned the names of our sources from them. Finally, a Federal grand jury and the Justice Department threw the case out of the same day. But at a cost: two weeks of hellish anxiety; thousands of dollars from Jack Anderson's pockets for legal fees; thin-stretching of our small staff during the two weeks I had to spend preparing my case...
...hollowness. They end up parodying themselves. Charlie's caught between outside pressure to conform to what traditionally held the neighborhood together, and peer pressure; between the pillars of his heritage and the way of life seductively decaying around him. He emerges vain, hypocritical and childish, sinning with scared, hellish abandon and giving only enough of himself to be self-serving. People finally have to suffer in order to save him, but he is imperturbable in his self-righteousness to the end, telling God, "Things are rough on me I know, but I'm trying, Lord, I'm trying...
...lush seriousness of his prose, Lowry was quite aware of the ridiculous, troublesome figure he cut for most of his 47 years. A touch of buffoonery even creeps into Under the Volcano, that hellish pressure cooker of a novel that was his only important work...
...establishment by rejecting an academic formalism rooted in the poetry of Eliot and Pound. They replaced this sterile stuff with a free-wheeling experiential American poetic idiom inspired by the more cautious William Carlos Williams. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," with its Whitmanesque catalogues of the poet's own undeniably hellish experience, became a banner around which the new American poets rallied...
When Carlos was six, his story runs, his parents took their only child back and lavished guilty affection on him. "It was a hellish year," he says flatly, "because I was living with two children." But a year later his mother died. The doctors' diagnosis was pneumonia, but Castaneda's is accidie, a condition of numbed inertia, which he believes is the cultural disease of the West. He offered a touching memory: "She was morose, very beautiful and dissatisfied; an ornament. My despair was that I wanted to make her something else, but how could she listen...