Word: fad
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rumanian-born Serban, who has become the latest fad hero of the self-styled experimentalists, the text is simply a mask that must be ripped off to reveal the unconscious, irrational blood flow of the play. The dramatist is presumed unable to capture the Id of his work in words, so the director imposes a distracting new subtext that blurs, blots out or mangles the real text. In The Cherry Orchard, earlier this season, Serban altered the living space of Chekhov's drama to a kind of surrealistic all-white silo in which Mme. Ranevskaya ricocheted around without...
...explain the lives of famous people by theorizing about their inner psyches. The best-known and most respected practitioner, Erik Erikson, subjected Luther and Gandhi to the treatment. Sigmund Freud once collaborated (with William Bullitt) on a job on Woodrow Wilson. By now psychobiography has become such a fad that last year an American Psychiatric Association task force recommended that psychiatrists avoid such projects unless the subjects are dead or give their permission...
Some Northerners attribute the new President's demonstrativeness to Southern ways. But an Atlanta public relations woman, Joanna Hanes, declares that "social kissing is more a Northern, sophisticated fad that seems to be moving south." In fact, like the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century, the epidemic of social kissing has persisted for some years and touched almost every section of the country. In Boston, Beacon Hill ladies can be seen rubbing cheeks at their clubs. Among usually subdued Midwesterners, the custom is growing, although one partygiver in Chicago admits: "Once when I kissed a fellow...
Felker is an idea editor, not a pencil editor. He has had remarkably accurate antennae for coming fashions -and a knack for catchy headlines that are often better than the articles and make each fad seem momentous. The list of writers for whom he has provided a springboard is also impressive. As features editor of Esquire from 1957 to 1962, he helped steer Norman Mailer into reportage and published some of the first so-called New Jourrialists, most notably Tom Wolfe. On the old New York Herald Tribune, where he edited the Sunday magazine that was to be reincarnated...
...reject the noble image of literature as a divine inspiration. In our view, language is a kind of putty that we can shape." Among the stranger shapes issuing from the OuLiPo factory are palindromes-words or statements that read identically backward and forward. "Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts," is elementary to an OuLiPo member. Perec has produced Ou LiPo's longest palindrome: a 5,000-letter treatise-on palindromes. Other OuLiPoian inventions are equally astonishing. Poet Jean Lescure's N (or V) +7 formula takes the noun or verb of a given...