Word: aper
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...ramble through the young republic, a trip that inspired Democracy, let's identify, just for the record, the single most annoying flaw in Lévy's tome: overly long sentences. Still with us? If so, then you will emerge from the author's thicket of anecdotes, aperçus and subordinate clauses to find your mind stimulated and faith in America renewed. Oh, another problem: Lévy is French. That means a preoccupation with theory, and he duly invokes Althusser, Aristotle, Habermas, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Lacan, Montesquieu, Nietzsche, Rousseau and a pantheon of other high domes...
...alongside Dickens. Another, smaller book could be made of his observations: "The stomach is really the basis of nationalism." "The infallible test for a gentleman is to drop in on him unfed, and see what he does about it." "Dogs, like very small children, are quite mad." Only one aperçu seems false...
...narrative away from its traditional purpose, i.e., telling what happened next, quickly. By the early decades of this century, serious story writers had pretty much replaced sequence with pattern, events with perceptions. The virtual disappearance of plot from short fiction produced, to be sure, plenty of wispy work, attenuated aperçus evoking the memory of an echo of a sigh. But the masters of the new form understood and met its twin demands: a stringent economy of language fused to a profligacy of inference...
From the outside, celebrity means receiving invitations to all the best parties, swapping aperçus with the noterati and finding beautiful women draped around your calves begging for a one-night meaningful experience. From the inside-of Woody Allen's head-celebrity is all of this, and ain't it awful? It means being introduced to a woman who wrote "the definitive cinematic study of Gummo Marx." It means being offered unproducible scripts, including a musical-comedy treatment of the Guyana massacre. It means being solicited to join committees for Soviet dissidents, to help stamp out leukemia...
...know that the University of Cincinnati has more social prestige than Sarah Lawrence, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr? Or that the quality of the faculty at Kutztown State College in Kutztown, Pa., is higher than at Smith, Oberlin and Yale? These are just a few of the amazing aperçus served up in a new $7.95 guide to U.S. colleges published last month by the New American Library and prepared by veteran Guide Author Gene R. Hawes. Billed as "A New Kind of College Guide that Reports on What You Want to Know Most-and First-About Colleges...