Word: conrad
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...rest of the bank's directors, he was tired and felt as he had prior to "a previous emotional altercation." A light rain on the windshield mixed the city with the sky, making the outline of the buildings nearly indistinguishable and their colors a forbidding grey. He mumbled of Conrad, of Zen and motorcycle maintenance, of his friend Robert Pirsig and his aircraft. I opened the door at the air terminal and turned to shake his hand and say "Thank you. You've been incredibly kind." But he turned with a miserable smile, "Tuan Jim," he half-mumbled and half...
...common with the other Beat writers from a literary point of view. You couldn't find two writers more different in their approach and style than myself and Kerouac." He rejected the term modernist as "meaningless," and claimed to be part of the picaresque tradition, "very definitely." He cited Conrad, Graham Greene, Kafka, Rimbaud and T.S. Eliot among his influences. Of course, he belongs among them, no mere cult figure but an important American writer in whatever tradition you care to pigeonhole him in, a denizen of the darkness who lived what Eliot only suspected, who saw life measured...
...School faculty has passed other resolutions, but only on University issues, C. Conrad Wright, professor of American Church History, said yesterday...
That's why the novel fails. The immediate temptation is to compare Styron to Conrad; Sophie is Polish, and there are even references, late in the novel, to Conrad's Lord Jim. Styron searches for good and evil, for the vestigia that demons leave, just as Conrad did; he may even be answering Saul Bellow's Nobel Laureate call for a return to Conrad, for a return to what Conrad called the "permanent, enduring, essential" in human existence. But Styron doesn't know "the horror." These are small shoes in the footprints of sasquatch...
...would be a neglect of the obvious to write about America without mentioning Tocqueville, or Africa without a nod to Conrad. Those authors are not only fixed points to steer by but fetishes that protect a writer from foundering in swamps of detail. Edward Hoagland does not get around to his ritual reference until page 91 of African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan: "Far from learning something new about the black-white torque that is such a misery in America, here I was freer of it. But the other reason why I had come to Africa, instead...