Word: adrift
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Throughout his intense immersion in the time of his times, Norman Mailer has repeated his conviction that making history is preferable to reading it. In his influential essay "The White Negro" (1957), Mailer turned the emerging social type known as the hipster into a daring pioneer adrift in "the perpetual climax of the present," freed of all moral guides and codes of conduct except the thrumming of his own nervous system. The author specifically disavowed any precedents for this existential frame of mind: "If the ethic reduces to Know Thyself and Be Thyself, what makes it radically different from Socratic...
...repartee, from Timothy Mayer's script, too often seems equally adrift. While former "Saturday Night Live" regular Denny Dillon performs confidently as Billy's mechanic, Lotus, her character soon becomes tiring. She refers to Edythe as "sea slime," but elsewhere her lines lose their freshness, especially in one explicitly excremental description of the Prince's brain. The book also forces Tune to reflect upon the time before everyone's birth, when we were "up swimming around in the sky waiting for the Lord to imagine...
...neophyte adrift in a computer store, it may seem a beacon of simplicity, sanity and humor. Amid all the intimidating machinery and densely technical literature, its plain white cover asks disarmingly, "What are those television-typewriters anyway?" Inside, it offers quaint woodcuts, turn-of-the-century ads and plenty of soothing printed words. No wonder that The Personal Computer Book, at $9.95, has become the fastest-selling computer guide on the market and has made its author, an erstwhile poet and promoter of Transcendental Meditation, something of an overnight celebrity. Peter McWilliams, 33, who wrote, printed and published the book...
Stallone plays an ex-Green Beret adrift in the Pacific Northwest, his final mooring cut loose by the discovery that his last surviving buddy from the old unit has died of cancer. Escorted out of a small town by an overzealous sheriff who mistakes him for a hippie (there is a certain antique air about the movie, which is based on a 1972 novel), he returns to assert his right to come and go as he pleases. This leads to jail, a breakout and the extraordinary wilderness chase that occupies the bulk of the film. In it, Stallone stands...
...Human kind cannot bear very much reality," T.S. Eliot observed. Evidently, neither can many prominent novelists. An increasing number are now in flight from the everyday world they used to chronicle. In his latest novel, God's Grace, Bernard Malamud conceived of a latter-day Noah, adrift on an ark. Doris Lessing has taken an apparently irreversible leap into outer space with her multivolume chronicle of "galactic empires." Now Joyce Carol Oates has again wandered off into the never-never land of the neo-gothic romance. In Oates' case, the purpose of the excursion is parody. A Bloodsmoor...