Word: adamancy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...enlargement of a stroboscopic photo by Gjon Mili of a walking nude, done in imitation of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which was itself based on an earlier sequential photo by Marey. The image stutters backward through technological time. But then it also looks like the grief-stricken Adam and Eve in Masaccio's Expulsion from Eden, and that turns the enormous grainy effigy of John Kennedy (then dead), with its repeated pointing hand, into a type of vengeful deity. Rauschenberg has had great moments of social irony. "The day will come," Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal...
Perhaps autopsy, the second scene's subject, sums up van Itallie's crude intent. The surgeon who coldly recites the method for penetrating a skull suggests the author's indirect way of probing minds. One tries to learn something about individuals after they have died, the other claims that Adam and Eve, Abel and Cain, prototypes who have never lived, can teach us something about ourselves...
Updike subtitles the novel "a romance," an artistic sleight of hand by which he allows himself the generous introduction of coincidences. The resonances of the original romance, the Garden of Eden parable, are plentiful. Jerry is a sort of suburban Adam, hopelessly in love, tempted to make his passion public and thereby cross the threshold into the "new morality." Sally, for her part, reveals herself to be the bad Eve as the action progresses; essentially sinful, she demonstrates her greediness and her poison. Beneath her pious confessions of concern for the feelings and future of Ruth and her children...
...strangely enough, does Jerry's Adam appear very much more attractive. Rather he appears an extremely self-righteous innocent who believes that he can follow his heart and escape from his former life with Ruth unscathed. His litany to her is cowardly and irresponsible--don't hate me, he whines, be happy for me, don't make it difficult for me. His egocentricity gnaws at us, the egocentricity of a man attempting to retain his innocence while all those around him are losing theirs...
Many experts gave both candidates low marks. Said Soviet Expert Adam Ulam of Harvard: "Neither one had any feeling for the terribly complex problems we have in dealing with Russia and the Communist countries. Much of the debate was nothing more than posturing." Added Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard: "Both candidates tended to make debating points in a way that raised doubts about the political-education value of these debates...