Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...extraordinary momentum. Cincinnati's city council made charming West 4th Street a historic district last year. Among the latest local projects: the conversion of a down-at-the-heels Renaissance Revival textile building into offices. The former Tivoli Union brewery in Denver, a pseudo- Bavarian fantasy, is a giddy complex of shops, offices, restaurants and movie theaters. The vast old Bullock's department store in downtown Los Angeles has been turned into the country's largest wholesale jewelry mart, and Houston's art deco Alabama Theater has merely exchanged one muse for another. The place is now a bookstore. Pioneer...
...buildings are refurbished, downtown revivification does not necessarily follow. The historic district of Charleston is an antebellum museum of architecture, but despite the surfeit of charm and platoons of tourists, the downtown was dying in the '70s. Developers proposed an un-Charlestonian remedy: a new hulking hotel-and-retail complex. Originally opposed by some preservationists, Charleston Place -- somewhat scaled down -- has not only breathed new life into the downtown but triggered another round of restoration work...
...obscure if influential British mathematician. The most obvious reference is to Turing's cracking the Nazi Enigma code, credited by Winston Churchill as a key intelligence feat of World War II. Confronted with an enemy that could change its code in a trice, almost infinitely and randomly, via a complex encrypting machine, Turing outwitted the device by building a sort of early computer. A second allusion is to the code of moral orthodoxy, which Turing violated by his homosexuality. He compounded that transgression by disregarding the Oxbridge gentleman's code of discretion. While homosexual colleagues retained their posts because they...
...solid social- problem drama, Whitemore and Lead Actor Derek Jacobi, who shared in the play's conception, plainly wanted something beyond gay-rights advocacy. In successive productions they have focused ever more on the intellectual insights that made Turing unique without losing either his eccentricity or his humanity. The complex structure of flashbacks and flash forwards, monologues and dreamlike incidents is meant to convey something of the flavor and psychological sources of his genius. Much like Mozart in Amadeus, this sophisticated thinker seems suspended emotionally in adolescence. As Turing, Jacobi speaks beautifully, zealously, of his passion for science but stutters...
Outside his native France, Novelist Georges Perec (1936-82) was known chiefly as a member of OuLiPo, an acronym for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). The authors and scientists who constituted this informal group had a common goal: the discovery of new or fiendishly difficult and complex ways of arranging words in sequence. When it came to setting Procrustean rules and then writing freely in spite of them, none of the OuLiPo circle was more inventive and whimsical than Perec. He composed a full-length novel, La Disparition, without once using the letter e. He devised...