Word: academicians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Great stories never die. They get reborn on stage. Part of Shakespeare's genius, as any good reader of the "Sources" section of Signet editions knows, was to find the dramatic in someone else's plot. An academician will tell you there is universal meaning and appeal in great works of art. As if to test that definition, playwrights have frequently adapted recongnized greats to new settings and genres. This spring Harvard dramatics offers all kinds of adaptations: Antigone is transported to a troubled Latin American nation and "Wherefore art thou" is put to music. Adaptations are a recognized...
...make its purpose intelligible. But if in place of our eye, it should be a purely material object, a photographic plate that has watched the action, then what we shall see in the courtyard of the Institute for example, will be, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is going to hail a cab, his staggering gait, his precautions to avoid tumbling on his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk, or the ground frozen over...
...never be sure if Proust thought photography was objective, if the various interpretations of the Academician are related to a spectrum of possible actions and those are depicted absolutely realistically, or to a number of possible conclusions drawn from the same picture. Proust was wordy anyway, but he might have meant that people looking at a photograph are also caught up in a kind of drama, and each person has a different idea of what will assist the action of his or her own life, and they latch onto the details in a picture accordingly...
...nations are united in keeping peace-despite villainous Klingons and Romulans. Jesco Von Puttkamer, a NASA scientist who gave two S.R.O. lectures at the convention, said that the show "reflects a positivistic attitude. It's a mirror to our present world with some adventure thrown in." Another academician who gives the show high marks is Astronomy Professor Leo Standeford, who has conducted a one-credit course in Star Trek at Minnesota's Mankato State University. His esteem is shared by the Smithsonian Institution, which has acquired a model of the Enterprise. Paramount is now planning to make...
...some extent a great man can control his autobiographer. With biographers he must trust to luck, and James Thurber has not been lucky. A couple of years ago, an academician named Charles Holmes produced a solemn literary biography called The Clocks of Columbus, in which he discerned, for instance, three levels of language in the 2,500 words of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Now comes New Yorker Writer Burton Bernstein with a drink-by-drink analysis, or bibulography, of the humorist's sometimes agonizing life...