Word: fanged
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fang and Claw. The Thomas affair is certainly the most shocking to occur within the labyrinth of Foggy Bottom personnel practices, but it is by no means the only one of its kind. Willard Brown, a Class 2 officer, discovered after his selection-out that the State Department had lost all of his personnel records and that consequently his name had not been considered for promotion for several years. Nor are good men being passed over just for clerical errors. The selection process in the department has traditionally been the last word in Darwinistic elitism. McClintock, although a highly regarded...
Canton's Tung Fang (East Wind) Hotel, however, stands in unhappy contrast. Wall Street Journal Reporter Robert Keatley found it "dark and dingy . . . perhaps China's worst," and Timesman Tillman Durdin recalls "the foul, surly service we got in Canton, perhaps because the hotel was overtaxed then by trade-fair visitors...
Chinese hotels are not air conditioned, despite sweltering summers, and the Americans found that room service was undependable. The crude domestic soap and toilet paper was best avoided. Room telephones in the Tung Fang, Roderick discovered, could be made to work once the dialing code was divined (dial 666 for the front desk)-but he had to go downstairs to learn the instructions...
Once meals are completed, the average evening on the town tends to turn into an early snooze. Chinese opera and ballet are available, but themes are heavily propagandized. Atop the Tung Fang is a club boasting a small orchestra. The tunes run to Peking hit-parade items or swingy outdated Western numbers. The wall decor consists mostly of choice quotations from the Chairman-in Chinese, of course. Bar girls and prostitutes, once a feature of nightclubs in China, are no longer in evidence...
Primeval isolation, a selfhood that is a mystery most of all to oneself, an animal sense of mortality-these are the terrors Miss Atwood has to offer. Technology, social sophistication, are transparent pretenses behind which man is naked, with drooling fang and club at the ready. Dealing in the artifices of well-made verse and well-made novel, she convincingly suggests that the overcivilized and the barbarous are one. Yet the Atwood message is beyond formulated pessimism; it has the rhythmic cycling of hope and despair natural to life itself. A lyricism as honest as a blade of grass...