Word: communalized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gloria, who changes her name to Witch Gliz while on the ritual lam from Mom's suburban Detroit subdivision, learns by doing and then recording her doings in a breezy diary. Sex, dope, kindness, generosity and communal living are good things because they make her feel good. Fortunately, imminent incest gives off bad vibrations before the big clutch...
...here is Quentin Anderson, professor of English at Columbia, patrolling American literature with a new set of Wanted posters for an even more heinous offense. Citing it as a "creeping apocalypse," Anderson points to the crime of the century: the hundred-year collapse of America's "communal ties." And he knows who did it. For undermining "the authenticating offices of the family and society" and putting a wobble in America's "sense of direction since the mid-nineteenth century," Wanted, Dead or Alive: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry James...
Anderson's detailed readings can be brilliant, as in his exposition of Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." But for a man who keeps demanding context and more context, he seems remarkably provincial. He acts as if the disintegration of "communal ties" were a problem invented by 19th century America. He is guilty of a crime of his own: thesis protecting. He neglects to point out that Emerson's "imperial self" was bred, after all, with the help of German philosophy. Every Zen trender can spot for himself the Oriental mysticism in Whitman, but as far as Anderson...
...supplied most of the vocabulary Anderson must use to discuss the "imperial self" in the first place. The last poet unaffected by an "imperial self" was a medieval troubadour, the last philosopher, Thomas Aquinas. Would Anderson blame Stendhal's The Red and the Black for the disintegration of "communal ties" in Europe...
About 80 women attended a communal dinner last Tuesday night at the "Corners of the Mouth" restaurant in Inman Square where they organized themselves into action groups...