Word: culted
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...better-known opening lines in American literature: "A screaming comes across the sky." Thus begins Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the mammoth and, to many, impenetrable novel that established Thomas Pynchon as the most important and mysterious writer of his generation. While his cult exfoliated, the author mostly remained silent; Slow Learner, a collection of five previously published stories, appeared in 1984. Now, at last, comes Vineland, Pynchon's first novel in nearly 17 years, and the faithful can again begin the quest for runic meanings, preferably hidden. And right up at the top of the second page of text, something...
...long enough to become pickled. Some of them are Tubefreeks, whose habits of Tubal abuse alert the vigilant authorities at NEVER (National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation). No one, however ascetic, seems immune to this electronic rescrambling of brain cells. A member of the Thanatoids, a Northern California cult enamored of death and resentful at still being alive, notes that his people look at TV religiously: "There'll never be a Thanatoid sitcom, 'cause all they could show'd be scenes of Thanatoids watchin' the Tube...
...laden with loot. Then they were reported to be traveling by car. There was speculation that they had fled abroad, but if so, only three countries seemed likely to accept them: China, which also sends tanks against its own people; North Korea, where dictator Kim Il Sung maintains a cult as extravagant as Ceausescu's; and Iran, where the Rumanian despot last week placed a wreath on the Ayatullah Khomeini's grave. At week's end Rumanian TV said the Ceausescus had been captured...
Washington, Paris, London and other capitals chose to overlook Ceausescu's steel Stalinist hand at home, where he enforced a shameless cult of his own personality. He tolerated neither dissent among citizens nor a difference of opinion inside the party. He appointed his wife to the Politburo, his sons to high party and government rank and more than 30 other relatives to official positions. He basked in such honorifics as the Genius of the Carpathians and the Danube of Thought while treating the Rumanian people with extraordinary cruelty...
...rise in the average age at which women marry, a decline in family size, and a jump in the divorce rate. The sole exceptions to these trends occurred in the 1950s, when, in the prosperous aftermath of World War II, motherhood and babymaking became a kind of national cult: there was a return to earlier marriage, families were bigger and divorce rates stabilized. Though women continued to pour into the workplace during the '50s, this fact was blotted out by the decade's infatuation with blissful domesticity. In the larger historical context, feminism appears to have been a rebellion against...