Word: monstering
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With the courteous horror of the Lilliputians for the oafish Gulliver, British commentators have recently felt obliged to pin down the invading monster of American culture, and examine it at close range. One of them, Sir William Haley, director general of BBC, began plans last fall for a series of talks by qualified intellectuals on the impact of America on European culture. BBC's five lecturers-three Englishmen and an Irishman, with Harvard Professor Perry Miller concluding in rebuttal a fortnight ago-seemed to pull up two stakes for every one they drove, but succeeded here & there in tethering...
Baron Ochs, the clumsy gallant of Der Rosenkavalier, Strauss thought was consistently misunderstood and misplayed. Instead of "a vulgar monster with a horrible make-up and proletarian manners," as most bassos represented him, Strauss intended him as "a rustic beau, a Don Juan of some 35 years, but nevertheless a nobleman . . . Inwardly he is gross (ein Schmutzian), but outwardly he remains quite presentable . . . Above all, his first scene in the bedroom must be played with extreme delicacy and discretion, it must not be repulsive ... In short, Viennese comedy, not Berlin farce...
...regime, already endowed with many of the powers of a respected, sovereign nation, was rising from Germany's ruins. The Western world, led by the U.S., was about to slip the shackles off defeated Germany; it would try to guide the country which had been both monster and genius, insane destroyer and industrious creator, to a place among the free nations...
Sloth slept with his eyes wide open in a sticky skein of cobwebs, and Anger was a spiky, comic-book monster which had just smashed a blood-spattered plate-glass window. Lust, the shock of the group-as well as the bottom in bad taste-was a leering, loathsome human figure, festooned with genitalia and en-ries cased in a prophylactic tube...
...make his misanthropic points ("I used to think a dowry was where you got milk-until I got married. I got milked plenty then"). He can affect poor hearing if it will make a gag go: once he pretended to think a woman described herself as a "monster" instead of a "spinster" ("Oh well," he said, winding up the whole discussion, "there isn't a great deal of difference...