Word: asphaltic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...youth watches with unblinking fascination as a farmhand tries to knead life back into a child who is "froze like a pump." A housewife sees beauty in the configurations of dead roaches. In the title story, an intricate prose poem about a small Midwestern town, windows are graves, asphalt crumbles, maples are decapitated to make way for electric wires ("voices in thin strips"), and the narrator sifts the ashes of a cooled love...
...destruction. Cars were not allowed and three or four troops stood at every intersection keeping people away. Still, fires were burning and every now and then a new one would start up. Fire hoses shot plumes of water straight across the street. And standing there on the wet asphalt, you could feel cold spray on your head and hands...
...Speedway is really two tracks: a two-mile road course for sports cars and the stock-car "trioval"-a roughly triangular, 2½-mile circuit with two high-speed turns banked at 31° and a third turn banked at 18°. The banking, the perfectly smooth asphalt paving, plus the track's unusual width -three cars can race abreast-make it the fastest race track in the world. In qualifying trials for last week's tenth annual Daytona 500, the top 13 qualifiers ran the course at more than 180 m.p.h...
...green steel structure, zooms over part of the neighborhood, the Everett-Forest Hills Elevated zooms over another part. Every two or three minutes an MBTA train passes overhead and the whole neighborhood rattles and shakes. In the middle of the neighborhood is a dirty, unkempt, little, asphalt-paved park dedicated to the memory of a Congregational minister who settled there...
...this is yet another one of those opaque novels of the tired "new wave" school. J.M.G. Le Clézio's writing is in turn dense and simple and occasionally brilliant. The ideas are old hat but earnestly pressed: God is dead, man lives simultaneously in an ugly asphalt jungle (outside) and an increasingly demented and purposeless state of mind (inside...