Word: attics
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Marital dry rot in suburbia. A clinging mama and her growing-up boy. An alcoholic advertising salesman in search of himself. These are three of the whitest elephants in the attic of contemporary fiction-and Author Richard Yates, 50, has devoted a tight, pellucid novel to each one. An odd but not inconsiderable literary achievement, particularly in an age so helplessly smitten with the new. Yates' work brands him as a traditionalist in the strictest sense: he is a writer who feels dutybound to tell familiar stories in conventional ways...
...again temptation got in his way. In 1968 he and four others were convicted of swindling members of the Friars - including Comedians Phil Silvers and Zeppo Marx and Singer Tony Martin -out of some $400,000 by cheating at cards. The elaborate fleecing system involved observers in the attic who peered through peepholes to read the cards of the players. They then flashed coded electronic signals to a member of the ring seated at the table, who picked up the messages on equipment he wore on a girdle beneath his clothes...
...view is the Uffizi's Medici Venus, because Jefferson longed to install a copy of her at Monticello. Not having been to Florence, he had never seen the original, which he knew through engravings and plasters. It is pleasant to see the Towneley Vase, that once renowned Attic mar ble of the 1st century A.D. on which Keats based several lines of Ode to a Grecian Urn. But Jefferson never saw it, and (as the catalogue admits) would probably have disliked the "licentious mysticism" of its Bacchic figures...
...came to colonize the new land responded by becoming a nation of tinkerers, backyard inventors and, ultimately, technologists. Now, lacking a wilderness but confronted with challenges as great as those faced by their ancestors, mid-20th century Americans are responding similarly. In university and corporate laboratories, in basement and attic workshops, they are busy trying to invent their way out of an energy crisis, the worst recession in a generation and, toughest of all, what appears to be a global shortage of raw materials and finished products of many kinds...
Visiting the archives may be something of an act of national piety. It is also absolutely fascinating, especially now. Archivist of the U.S. James Rhoads has just opened an exhibit called "Milestone Documents of American History." From every corner of his 21-story attic, Rhoads has assembled and put on view priceless originals: the Louisiana Purchase Treaty of 1803; the Homestead Act of 1862, which opened the West; the Monroe Doctrine (actually two widely spaced references in President James Monroe's 1823 annual message); the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863; patents for Eli Whitney's cotton...