Word: aping
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...everybody likes the monkey house. The chimps clutch the bars and make faces; the orangutans lounge obscenely and scratch their hairy orange arms. With ape-like gestures, the cast members of the Mainstage production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade shriek, jabber and carry on. As the inmates of the asylum of Charenton, they perform a play within a play. The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat, written by one of their own number, the Marquis de Sade...
Baby Fae was not the first person to receive the heart of an ape. In 1964, when heart transplants were a new idea, University of Mississippi Surgeon James Hardy replaced the heart of a 68-year-old man with that of a chimpanzee, but the patient died within a few hours. In 1977 Christiaan Barnard, the South African pioneer of heart transplants, made two attempts to use simian hearts: in a 26-year-old woman, who survived for only six hours, and in a 59-year-old man, who died four days after surgery. In each case, Barnard "piggybacked...
...Aesop were alive today," maintains Isaac Bashevis Singer, "he might have written a fable about a skunk who was psychoanalyzed to lose his stench, or about a hare who preached the dictatorship of hares . .. When art begins to ape science it becomes exactly that-an ape. It appears just as ridiculous when it tries with its limited powers to retard or push forward the wheels of history...
...play not only with the lopsided Englishness of his choices but with his embrace of verbally experimental books (Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, John Earth's Giles Goat-Boy) and of sci-fi or futuristic visions (Kingsley Amis' The Anti-Death League, Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence). His list is as striking for what it leaves out as for what it includes. Every reader will have his favorite omissions-after all, that is half the fun of literary parlor games like this-but just to name five: John Cheever's Bullet Park, Nigel Dennis...
...symbol, Tarzan (played lithely but never blithely by Christopher Lambert) requires little decoding. Born the seventh Earl of Greystoke to parents shipwrecked on the African coast, orphaned in infancy and raised by an extended family of apes, he is rescued and restored to his patrimony by a passing explorer (Ian Holm, who symbolizes humanity at its best). Unfortunately, he fits as uneasily into English society as he did into simian society, despite the loving fuss made over him by his grandfather (the late Ralph Richardson in all his glorious eccentricity). The old man's death, when he attempts...