Word: heroic
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...version of Beowulf that was told from Grendel's point of view. There is a scene in which a wandering bard arrives among the drunken cretins and begins to sing beautiful songs to them about what they have accomplished that day in battle. Atrocity becomes glory, bloodletting becomes heroic. It is a shrewd point about mythmaking, and perhaps about the making of the myth of Camelot...
White's book about 1960 is in some ways a hymn and a poem not only to American democracy but to the American landscape and American people, to their varieties and resonances. White's writing then strikes a heroic note that sounds odd to the American ear now. But perhaps a sense of eloquence and size has passed out of history's favor...
...with the gifted Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. Images of corporal corruption -- of malefic birth and voracious organs -- stalk his They Came from Within, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome. Heads explode, and monsters issue from the wombs of women. In Cronenberg's masterwork, The Fly, one man wages a heroic, doomed struggle against physical and moral degeneration; his body has a twisted mind of its own. The catalog of punishments seems medieval -- Savonarola meets Bosch -- even as it taps baby boomers' fears of decaying vitality and eviscerated dreams. For Cronenberg the body is a haunted house whose rumblings trigger lust...
TUCKER. Francis Ford Coppola fashions a grand entertainment from the heroic efforts of Preston Tucker to market his 1947 "car of tomorrow...
...gift from a dying patient and armed with an indomitable determination, Dame Cicely opened St. Christopher's, the world's first modern hospice. In doing so, she changed the impersonal, technocratic approach to death that since World War II has become endemic in overwhelmed Western hospitals. No heroic efforts were made to prolong life. There was no operating theater; no temperatures were taken or pulses recorded. Instead of specialists mumbling into charts, there were doctors sitting at bedsides holding patients' trembling hands. When death came, it was not with the accompaniment of IV drips and respirators but with tranquil normality...