Word: preciously
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...raises the degree of exploitation. In no case are we told anything about the possible origins of their psychoses. They are putty to be shaped in McMurphy's hands, and McMurphy is basically out to have a good time--for him that means "fighting and fucking." Since there's precious little of the latter in the all-male ward, he is reduced to a stance of constant truculence which eliminates any trace of compassion he might have ever felt. The funny thing about Forman's film is the complete disharmony between any objective evaluation of the facts and events...
Good morning to the day, and next my gold!/Open the shrine, that I may see my saint." With the miser's first lines in Volpone. Ben Jonson put his finger on it: that deep connection between the two aspects of precious metal, as crude capital and as metaphor of heaven, that so long existed in Christian...
...those who entrust a member of the community with a task in their continuing humanization. Bright-eyed junior managerial lemmings who crowd around political figures over sherry in our common rooms may have no inkling of this, except as platitude; neither, for that matter, may self-congratulatory sectarian "radicals," precious literary "humanists," or other "individualists" coping with the pains of life in a liberal market economy. The lesson of the late 'sixties was that we must surrender these insidious self-conceptions, for without a stronger social glue, without people's sense of themselves as passionate shapers of a common destiny...
Whatever the case, precious few really good novels are written and the reason might well be a forgetfulness on the novelist's part. Too many modern novelists are too concerned with sophisticated characters and slick with. But modern society's search for basics leads directly to Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall and his truly commonplace characters and settings. Few things are more ordinary than North Dakota and Illinois, farmers, plumbers and schoolteachers, solid parents and curious children. Yet Woiwode has taken the universal elements in these common people, places and things and made them into strong, well-defined...
DECADENCE IS A VAPID and appallingly amoral book in more ways than all this indicates. Hougan, a contributing editor of Harper's, seems to suffer from a malady from which precious few journalists escape--a desire to retire to an isolated cabin somewhere and put it all together. In the effort, he's thrown together an indiscriminate, undirected mix of modern philosophy, fiction and social theory, and fitted it to everything on the American scene. There is hardly a cliche of any sort about recent America that's missing, be it drugs, the New Army, rock music, assassinations, or Nixon...