Such remarks as I make about you are based solely on your Commentary essay, "Authenticity and the Modern Unconscious," and refer only to the first part and the impossibility of being held "spellbound".
And last year Mr. Louvin was asked to join the band Cake's "Unlimited Sunshine Tour," where rock fans young enough to be his grandchildren were held spellbound by his spare songs about salvation and sin.
In the gulag, one finds he can survive through his knack for storytelling: he starts reciting what he remembers of Stevenson's Treasure Island, and a saucer-eyed crowd of murderous tough guys are held spellbound, promising pieces of bread if he can continue.
Both were then in their mid-30s, Di Stéfano balding and Puskás with a pot belly, but that evening more than 125,000 Scottish fans were held spellbound by their sublime, almost exotic skill in what is still regarded as one of the greatest games ever.
But back in a crowded conference room at the Waldorf, some 300 world leaders in politics, industry and finance were held spellbound by a freewheeling, solo seminar conducted by someone whose idea of a great meal was the Mexican platter at the White House mess: former President Bill Clinton, the ultimate Davos Man, always ready to expound on globalization until the last top-dog dies.
From eastern Siberia to the Yukon, audiences are touched by this beautiful and colorful story the same way an eight-year-old in Southern Italy was held spellbound listening to an LP.
Their eyes, like citrus orbs, beam out of glossy charcoal fur, and hold you spellbound.
Spookily enough, rates soon soar; insurers wriggle out of paying up; and loyalty schemes hold us spellbound to the same expensive shops.
Richard Jolly, a colleague of Mr Haq, recalled this week that "he would hold audiences spellbound, weaving together his proposals and vision in a subtle mixture of technical analysis, political cunning and with the tones and uncompromising principles of the true preacher".Has the preaching brought any benefit to the poor that Mr Haq clearly cared about?
Fiction may struggle to hold us spellbound in the manner of music, but its prompting of more diverted states of mind, and its depictions of the richness and freedom found in the sloppiness of drifting thought, suggests how constricted a world can be that treats attention as its own end.
