Word: birdness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most underground newspapers are a garish amalgam of barnyard prose, bare bosoms, revolutionary tracts and sex-oriented want ads. Still, the 50 or so underground publications, including the Los Angeles Free Press, New York's East Village Other and Atlanta's Great Speckled Bird, cover a market beyond the reach of straight media. Some record companies, book publishers and clothing manufacturers have found it worthwhile to promote their wares in the underground press, often baiting their copy with radical themes...
...third of the way through Doris Lessing's new novel, a great white bird appears-4 ft. tall with a straight yellow beak. The light shines off its feathers "like sun off a snowfield." Its eyes are round, golden and steadily staring-in invitation, in challenge...
...Violence series, and after The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing has finally confronted her Moby Dick. All the weathered idealism that survived two arduous decades of fiction-writing in South Africa, then England-all the hopefulness of a fundamentally hopeful woman-has gone into the beating wings of her bird. Like the bird, the novel is a brilliant and untamed image of the possibilities that Miss Lessing dreams, rather than believes, may still constitute man's destiny...
...professor, who was picked up rambling and confused near London's Waterloo Bridge at midnight, under the impression that he had survived an odyssey as bizarre as anything out of Homer. Watkins fights to remember his visions, which involve legendary yellow beasts as well as the great white bird, and a bloody, obscene war between a species of monkeys and "rat-dogs." Doctors X and Y try to make him remember his wife, his family, his name and occupation-what they call reality. A fantastic prose-poem myth struggles against, and alternates with, the dry formulas of a psychiatric...
Upon this mystical heaven, upon the great white bird that takes Watkins there-in other words upon some ultimate metaphysical truth-Miss Lessing stakes her faith in the future. Her self-absorption is both irritating and fascinating as she gambles at the borderline of sanity, just as she once gambled at the far-out edges of politics...