Word: ignoramuses
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...When his wife brings up Gavino's illiteracy, Efisio dismisses her misgivings and assures her that their eldest will learn quickly. He then quizzes Gavino on multiplication tables, greeting his son's off-the-mark guesses with a palm planted squarely on Gavino's right cheeck and shouts of "Ignoramus!" Gavino's blue eyes burn with an all-too-familiar rage, but when his father is called, Gavino and his family dutifully follow into another room. But we can see in his eyes that Gavino Ledda has resolved never again to submit to the open palm or branch-switch wielded...
...Critic Reza Baraheni describes one of the men who tortured him in Iran's notorious Committee Prison, where Baraheni was held without charge for 102 days in 1973. Baraheni, who now lives in exile in New York City, recognized in torturers like Azudi the "typical thick-necked Iranian jahel [ignoramus], fat and tall and dirty and, at the same time, shrewd, irrevocable, irresistibly virile and strong." Azudi insisted that prisoners address him with the honorific title "doctor," as do equally brutal thugs who run torture centers in Brazil and did so formerly in Greece. The title, apparently, confers...
...Surrealist Max Ernst, which will remain after the family leaves. It has a seven-foot mink coverlet, trap doors for lamps, telephones and stereo controls, as well as accompanying sun and moon medallions at the head and foot, and a lithograph of Ernst's painting The Great Ignoramus. The Rockefellers have also contributed a dozen pieces of furniture, including Korean and Japanese chests, which will remain after the family vacates the house...
...impossible to describe, but they seem to be autobiographical, spiced with some of cumming's favorite poems in world literature. Cummings explained his nonlectures this way: "while a genuine lecturer must obey the the rules of mental decency, and clothe his personal idiosyncrasies in collectively acceptable generalities, an authentic ignoramus remains quite indecently free to speak as he feels. This prospect cheers me...since I can't tell you what I know (or rather what I don't know there's nothing to prevent me from trying to tell...
...other hand, if a crank or an ignoramus took the Urbino paintings, they may have been jettisoned or destroyed by now, in panic. Siviero is inclined to discount the concrete-bunker theory-the mad millionaire gloating over stolen masterpieces in solitude. The collector, he believes, "wants to be able to enjoy the possession and to show it off." That leaves the extortion hypothesis: the work of art taken either to get a ransom or some political favor. In fact, however, the few ransom demands that have been made have turned out to be phony. Even if they were real, they...