Word: hoaxing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...scented bath which gives you electric shocks at unexpected moments." Many of the shocks came from Zen Buddhism, which Koestler feels makes sense in Japan's rigidly conformist social structure. "Taken at face value and considered in itself," he writes, "Zen is at best an existentialist hoax, at worst a web of solemn absurdities. But within the frame work of Japanese society, this cult of the absurd, of ritual leg-pulls and nose-tweaks, made beautiful sense. It was, and to a limited extent still is, a form of psychotherapy for a selfconscious, shame-ridden society, a technique...
...couple's embarrassingly Negroid blessing. For all its apparent defiance of realism, this kind of Spark fiction-typical of most tales in this collection-has honest intentions: to make vivid the author's conviction that the face of the world is a mask, and that the real hoax is on those...
...doings along King Street and the arrival and departure of ships. Allen set about extending the paper's horizon, but not without occasional whimsical excursions into island fun. ?No one could be really sure what would appear on April Fools' Day. Allen once ran a great hoax about the remains of a Viking Ship being uncovered in the sands off Waimanalo Beach, a completely phony yarn that other island newspapers cheerfully picked up and ran straight. The paper periodically loved to "discover" enormous new volcanoes rising from the sea off some isolated island beach...
...local swindlers named Lopez and Pardo dread the rising "reform" dictator. Lopez mulcts tourists and gets a kickback from the police. This pair of wily thugs equip shifts of demonstrators to parade before the U.S. embassy with slogans suggesting that the latest revolutionary coup is a Communist takeover. The hoax works. Soon U.S. planes are flying the Equatorian "Freedom Fighters" to Washington. The fact that the "resistance heroes" consist mainly of Lopez, Pardo and nightclub floozies scarcely fazes ERRA, the Equatorian Refugee Relief Administration, which is shortly manned by 3,000 paper shufflers. Since "revolutions become habit-forming," Lopez...
...Graham, Perry Como, Southerners, Mother's Day, dogs ("vulgar love proletarians"), advertising ("a soggy, overripe fungus"), Guy Lombardo, Ernest Hemingway, and Harry J. Anslinger, the head of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics. TV is in the hands of "lentilheaded sponsors' wives" and represents "some sort of gargantuan hoax," with one or two exceptions. (His own talk program, Alex in Wonderland, which is now being syndicated nationally, "is as refreshing as a breath of stale air in a vacuum.") As for people in general, they are "adenoidal baboons" caught in life's "erratically op erated sausage machine...