Word: conscious
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Contagious Tastes. The crumbling of the old national barriers is neither a conscious nor idealistic process. Says a cynical Parisienne: "If the whole youth of Europe was told, 'You are a unity from the Elbe to the Atlantic,' its answer would be, 'We could not care less.' " Yet, in practice, young Europeans recognize their kinship. "Wherever I go in Western Europe," says a Berlin physics student, "I feel as if we all have the same blood group. We don't really have to bother to get acquainted, because there's nothing strange about anybody...
...copy boy he is in the novel's opening chapters; Blyden's lines still snarl with Sammy's hungry, terrifying drive. Nor does it matter very much that the gutter gags had to be cleaned up, that the Jewish humor is sacrificed to the self-conscious contemporary convention that seldom allows so much as a smile with a racial or religious twist. Although the word is taboo, the poor exploited slob who ghosted Sammy's screenplays is still a nebbish; every now and then, Blyden's voice echoes with accurate Lower East Side accents...
Britain's famed public schools are flourishing as before. The class-conscious Englishman still feels compelled to give his children a distinctive U (upper-class) accent, recoils in horror from the non-U patois prevalent in many state schools. Yet public schools are also so costly ($1,200 yearly at Harrow) that many U parents are switching over to state schools, particularly at the primary level. At one brand-new school near London's fashionable South Kensington, the curb is lined with Bentleys, Jaguars and nannies when classes let out each afternoon. Says one U mother...
...finest story in the issue is by Kurt Blankmeyer, a piece called Saturday Burial, which describes the narrator's childhood experiences with a mad widow, and her dog Siegfried. The widow is a powerful Teuton transparently called Edda Norse, and the story has a conscious Germanic flavor and a fine not to say exciting Wagnerian ending. Saturday Burial is written in the same half-understanding, wide-eyed manner as Blankmeyer's Victory Over Japan, but less skillfully. The development is somewhat mechanical, and the events which should happen spontaneously seem to be plotted by an all-too-visible hand...
This impassioned and vague plea has its interesting aspects, but seems fatuous. It implies, or rather assumes, the existence of a determined and self-conscious attitude among the writers of post-adolescent love fiction. These tales are obviously intensely personal things and their authors doubtless believe that they are probing the situation to the very limit, which they very well might be doing. It seems a bit ludicrous to hope that a new moral framework (if indeed the whole idea has any meaning), will come from the pens of a group of writers whose entire effect comes from the charm...