Word: circusing
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...CIRCUS...
...dare!" reads the blurb on the garishly illustrated cover. "See the werewolf turn into a real flesh-and-blood woman-right before your very eyes." This pitchman's approach, aimed at newsstand buyers of books on the occult, is misleading, for the product, a slim volume entitled The Circus of Dr. Lao, is no tawdry sci-fi thriller. It is instead a blending of the sardonic style of Ambrose Bierce and the homespun hyperbole of Mark Twain...
...Circus tells a tale that could happen only in America. A circus, under the direction of an apparently ageless Chinese named Dr. Lao, arrives one day in the town of Abalone, Ariz., and delivers delights that even Barnum would have hedged at promising. "The world is my idea," says Dr. Lao. "As such I present it to you." The circus, a metaphor for his world, is half dream, half nightmare. In its sideshow tents a puritanical schoolteacher is seduced by a syrinx-playing satyr, a gorgon turns an unbelieving harridan into "carnelian chalcedony," one of the harder varieties of building...
Another area for urgent institutional reform: the cumbersome way in which presidential candidates are chosen. The nominating process is an interminable circus, an obstacle course of costly and wearing primary campaigns culminating in a political convention which, whatever its advantages as spectacle, seems an unreliable way for the nation to go about selecting its leaders. The Democrats in 1972 tried to open the process to more popular participation, but the results were mixed, and the party became distracted by being bogged down in arguments over minority quotas and the like. Also obviously needed are reforms in campaign financing, to enable...
Collage of Culture. Joined by their wives, who had spent the day at the famous Moscow Circus School, the two leaders went to the Bolshoi Theater Friday night for a superb collage of Soviet culture, bits of ballet, opera, folk singing, Cossack dancing and even a chorus of Swanee River, in both English and Russian. The couples, together with Kissinger, Kosygin and Podgorny, watched the performance from a flag-draped box at the rear of the theater, and during the intermission gathered for a light buffet. Toasting the women at the table, Brezhnev gallantly reached into a bouquet of roses...