Word: backwards
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Having jumped backward, the author suddenly leaps ahead. It is now 1980, and Jake is an English professor in Boston, still maimed by the events of two decades earlier: "McKay had once regarded it as the central task of his life to understand what had destroyed his family. Yet he had not directly addressed that question in twenty years." On cue, Magda Dettke, the infant from Berlin, appears in his office. Her mother, the woman Jake had seen in the museum 20 years ago, is dead. Magda now works for British intelligence, and she has startling news. Giles wants...
...told TIME last week, "We are not trying to strut like roosters, but I am less worried today than when the British fleet sailed. The loss of so many lives has made negotiations more difficult. Above all, the Argentine people will not let us take one step backward. The Argentines are winning...
...hole in it, and that of "modern painting" was a canvasful of drips, then the cliché of "video art" is a grainy closeup of some U.C.L.A. graduate rubbing a cockroach to pulp on his left nipple for 16 minutes while the sound track plays amplified tape hiss, backward. Video art has not yet shaken off its reputation as clumsy, narcissistic and obscure...
...square-sawed balk of larch, 39½ ft. high. At first it looks like a dead inverted tree, standing on a pedestal, its branches lopped to stubs. Then one becomes aware that the whole form of the tree has been patiently excavated, by carving, from the sawed block. Working backward into the wood from knots, Penone has raised the buried ghost of the tree as it looked when it was younger. This may sound a simple conceit, but it is not: the finished sculpture, almost "nature" but not quite, also relates in a subtle way to the organic spiral form...
...Israel. In one biblical case, salt symbolized a lack of fidelity. In Genesis 19:1-29, two angels of the Lord command Lot, his wife and two daughters to flee the sinful city of Sodom without ever looking back. When Lot's wife cast a fleeting glance backward (her faith was uncertain), she was immediately transformed into a pillar of salt. A Roman religious ritual, however, in which grains of salt were placed on an eight-day-old babe's lips, prefigures the Roman Catholic baptismal ceremony in which a morsel of salt is placed in the mouth...