Word: fragmentism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...years old. or some 100,000 years older than the Peking man or Java man. Says Leakey, a broad, rumpled, sometime Cambridge don: "My 19-year-old son Jonathan wandered across a slope during a pause in our other work at Olduvai and picked up a small fragment of animal jaw. 'You've got a saber-toothed tiger.' I said. We'd been expecting to get one. So we started a small dig, and the first thing we got was a human tooth. That's the way things are found in archaeology-a combination...
From a lobster pot 116 feet deep in the waters off Jewell Island, Me. came a possible clue to the mystery disappearance of France's late Captain Charles Nungesser, who vanished somewhere over the Atlantic 34 years ago. Lodged in the pot was a fragment of an instrument panel, which may have come from Nungesser's ill-fated biplane, L'Oiseau Blanc. On May 8, 1927, the dashing Nungesser and his navigator, François Coli, took off from Paris, aiming at the $25,000 Orteig Prize, which awaited the first man to fly nonstop between Paris...
This flawless (because meaningless) fragment of prose is offered as a parody of the once-famed gibberish of Gertrude Stein, and is the work of an unknown writer, Arthur Flegenheimer. It is one of the more recondite items in this anthology of Dwight Macdonald, critic, polemicist and New Yorker staff writer. To see just how recondite it is, the reader must not miss the footnote, in which it is disclosed that the obscure Flegenheimer is Mobster Dutch Schultz, and that the Stein "parody" is a police stenographer's transcript of his dying delirium. Such thimbleriggery is a fair sample...
Many educators question whether humans can be taught this way. But there is already ample evidence that in subjects that lend themselves easily to fragment learning, e.g., grammar, spelling, foreign languages, mathematics, automated teaching is far more efficient than the old-fashioned blackboard. New York's Collegiate School for boys tried teaching machines in math, found that 73 students completed in only two weeks an abstract-algebra course that usually requires two months. The Roanoke public schools used teaching machines on 34 eighth-graders-with no oral teaching and no homework-and in less than one semester...
...such pioneer abstract painters as Piet Mondrian. But all his life Schwitters made a modest living painting realistic portraits aimed at pleasing the sitter. In 1919 he branched away from the Dadaists, founded his own movement, which he called Merz. The word had no meaning, but came from a fragment of a piece of newsprint bearing the phrase Commerz-und Privatbank that he had pasted on one of his collages. "Merz," he wrote later, "stands for freedom from all fetters, for the sake of artistic creation...