Word: alienness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...INSULT THE AMBASSADOR" is the latest weapon in President Reagan's foreign policy arsenal. When Nicaragua's new envoy arrived in Washington last week, he was greeted not with the usual diplomatic niceties but with a note scolding his government for "inviting alien influences and philosophies into the hemisphere. "Tragically, the hostile attitude adopted by Reagan and his advisors toward the Nicaraguan Sandinistas could easily push a country open to friendly relations with the United States into the Soviet camp...
Luckily, crime and the underclass are not the only element in The Dean's December. Bellow may not have achieved the great foray into the alien waters he had hoped for, but he remains brilliantly entertaining on his home turf. In particular, his characters are dazzling. Valeria Raresh, Corde's mother-in-law, for whom the Corders have traveled to Rumania (Bellow, incidentally, also went to Bucharest several years ago with his mathematician wife on a similar journey) lies in a state hospital, her face criss-crossed with tapes and tubes. After a coronary and a stroke, it is only...
Unfortunately, there is a large contingent of these plot-seekers among today's readers. Theirs is the soap-opera or bad science-fiction approach to literature. Squeeze in a sufficient number of strange romantic liaisons, family scandals, new and improved forms of alien visitors, and so on, and the actual words in which these twists are conveyed are relatively unimportant. Throw in great wars or scheming terrorists, and the author need barely be literate...
...much use is made of it in the game cartridges. Graphics seem perfunctory, and the games generally are too shallow to interest adults. Dynasty, a promising maze puzzle based on the Chinese game Go, is too easy to be interesting. Cryptologic is a not-very-mystifying letter substitution code. Alien Invaders?Plus shows one imaginative quirk, a tiny figure that flees in terror when its fortress is destroyed, but otherwise is an uninspired copy of Space Invaders...
...sense of being condemned to uselessness in a world that worships the useful. Out-of-work people who do not develop such feelings on their own are apt to be given them when they visit the unemployment office: there the applicant is more often treated like an alien culprit in need of interrogation than an unlucky citizen in need of assistance. Says a young writer who was among the anonymous hundreds that Harry Maurer taped for the oral history Not Working: "I always get the feeling that the people at the umemployment office think...