Word: laughing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...hits the right tone at his first entrance, appearing in a properly hideous green-and-red costume that clashes with his black-and-orange shoes. He belches, eats and picks his teeth with his fingers, talks with food in his mouth, and makes the most of a vulgar, cackling laugh...
...Laugh at the Laugh. When West first started to bat about with his phosgene-filled clown's bladder, he was an expatriate boulevardier in Paris, sporting umbrella and plaid overcoat among the beards and corduroy of the lost generation. The Dream Life of Balso Snell seems on the surface like one of those near-sophomoric, painfully private japes played for the semiprivate public of a little magazine. It concerns the dream adventures of Balso Snell, a poet, who enters a Trojan Horse from the rear end ("Anus Mirabilis!"), and encounters a number of symbolic characters in the murky interior...
...sick I am of literary bitches. But they're the only kind that'll have me"), the boy has written a pamphlet that sounds very like West's own credo: "I always find it necessary to burlesque the mystery of feeling at its source; I must laugh at myself, and if the laugh is 'bitter,' I must laugh at the laugh. The ritual of feeling demands burlesque...
Harvard is a little different. Here, tradition and atmosphere create a situation which to some degree obstructs the urge for self-renunciation. But here, rarely a laugh or cry, rarely the truly different. Walk along the river some warm evening.... very few people alone, thinking, worrying, wondering. Only the loving couples, a few retired professors on the benches, and a tired dog. See the species pre-media, the impersonal, mark-con-scious eyes and the pale, insipid faces. Peek into the Bick.... the white-sneaker crowd, sipping flat coffee with their flat conversation...
...succeed pulses through every young heart. And it is a desire to become known (substitute: influential, accepted, wealthy), not merely to become, as an individual. It is all "outer-directed" becoming. And somehow, amidst it all, I feel the whole futile surge of energy deserves a great horse laugh. The joke is on somebody, or everybody...