Word: alterations
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DEATH USED TO BE the great equalizer. It was as inevitable as taxes, and awesome in its finality. Preparation for dying and what lay beyond preoccupied man and defined civilizations. But building pyramids, lighting eternal flames, and performing rituals, no matter how extravagant, could never alter an individual tragedy or the grim common destiny. One could resist death for a while, and with a little luck, choose where and when. But with few delays or complications, death always got its man. And when you were dead, you were dead. Those were the good old days...
...with a decade of hard work and good living still left to him, John O'Hara published Sermons and Soda-Water, a collection of three novellas written in the voice of James Malloy, the writer's most obvious fictional alter ego. Like O'Hara, Malloy was the son of a small-town doctor, had been a newspaper reporter, pressagent and screenwriter. Now he was introduced as a successful novelist devoting himself to "the last, simple but big task of putting it all down as well as I knew how." This book was, as Finis Farr notes...
...connections to the Hitler era are obvious: the unquestioning obedience to authority, the abnegation of responsibility, the refusal to alter ordinary patterns of behavior. But these issues apply to other political situations as well, and the play does not depend on the memory of Hitler for its power. Mrozek has created a situation which alludes to the war years and at the same time transcends that specific period. Placed in such a situation, we would be just as likely as Mr. I or Mr. II to act the way they do. We cannot find excuses or explanations for their actions...
...Nauman's casts and templates of parts of his body, which are merely spin-offs and rip-offs from Johns in the late '50s and, more distantly, from Duchamp's own interest in molding. That some of these Naumans are made of neon tubing does not alter this, any more than the fact that some of his word-pieces (e.g., a sign that lights up "R A W" backward and "W A R" forward) are neon raises them above simplemindedness. A second-or third-hand existence is intrinsic to his work...
...Time Inc. Elson skillfully develops the contrast between the innocent gusto with which its magazines threw themselves into the war effort after Pearl Harbor, and the gradually chastening complexities of postwar and cold-war politics. In his last years, Luce, the author of The American Century, worked hard to alter the more simplistic aspects of his patriotism. The result was a more universal theme for his last crusade: the American support and promotion of international law. It was the natural extension of his editorial conscience...