Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Throughout his intense immersion in the time of his times, Norman Mailer has repeated his conviction that making history is preferable to reading it. In his influential essay "The White Negro" (1957), Mailer turned the emerging social type known as the hipster into a daring pioneer adrift in "the perpetual climax of the present," freed of all moral guides and codes of conduct except the thrumming of his own nervous system. The author specifically disavowed any precedents for this existential frame of mind: "If the ethic reduces to Know Thyself and Be Thyself, what makes it radically different from Socratic...
...risk. We must obey it every time. There is no credit to be drawn from the virtue of one's past." This figure has given much thought during his lives to the mysterious, possibly magic properties of human excrement, a topic that Mailer has pondered in an essay called "The Metaphysics of the Belly" and in various interviews. The purpose of Menenhetet's research, he tells Ramses IX, is "to enrich the marrow of our failing lands," a task reminiscent of the "great mission" that Mailer took up on behalf of his country in the 1950s: "to save...
...written about the Board. So much so, in fact, that there is probably little that I can say here which will be new to those who have sought to inform themselves about the Administrative Board. People whose thirst for information about the Board is not sated by reading this essay, and I expect there will be few in that category, might like to look at other publications. The Undergraduate Council has recently distributed a question and answer pamphlet about the Board which is quite useful. Those who would like a more official version of much the same information can consult...
...Abba Eban, 68, Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1966 to 1974, and the question revolves around Israel's controversial role in last year's massacre of 700 to 800 Palestinian refugees in Beirut. Eban addresses that issue, among others, in a provocative new essay: his twelve-page introduction to an English-language version of the Israeli commission-of-inquiry report on the massacre, commercially reprinted in the U.S. this week (Karz-Cohl...
...policy in El Salvador, for example-is too important to be left to the flaccid (two sides to every question) processes of free speech and calm discussion. Why tolerate ideas that are so obscenely wrong? History is not high tea. As the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote in his essay Repressive Tolerance, under the free-speech practices of a liberal regime, "the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed." History is not the MacNeil-Lehrer Report either. Should one grit one's teeth and recite...