Word: idol
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...always painful to watch on old idol topple. This time it was embarrassing as well. Isaac Asimov's contribution to the anthology was an agonizingly moralistic little tale entitled "Segregationist." It's all about this surgeon who is a robot, you see, and he's trying to convince a VIP who's qualified to receive an artificial heart to accept a fiber heart instead of a metal one because he doesn't like to see "mongrelization" between humans and robots--except that you aren't suppose to know until the end that he's a robot. That's because...
Bunk was a symbol of the perseverence of that music and the culture which had engendered it. His career stretched all the way back to the 1890's when he had played with the famous Buddy Bolden band. Bunk had been the idol and teacher of many great New Orleans trumpet men, including Louis Armstrong. "They was all crazy behind old man Bunk's playing" he said himself in 1942. He had worked in every joint in Storyville, and played countless parades and funerals throughout the city. And now in the 40's, ten years after his "retirement" from music...
Before you destroy a system, propose another that will solve (not hide, shift or disguise) unemployment, "exploitation," war. Anyone can promise Utopia--without specifying a program. Tom Hayden, idol of the New Left, has said: "First we'll make the revolution--then we'll find out what for." Would you employ a plumber who rips out all the pipes in your house before he learned how to repair a leak...
Death Throes. To a pounding, throbbing cacophony of percussion and the shrill tooting of a wooden flute, dancers in extravagant costumes celebrate legendary rituals, their stiff-legged gyrations seeming, like some ancient idol, only half alive. Dancer Jorge Tyller, a Yaqui Indian, reenacts with awesome control the death throes of a shot deer, his tortured posturings bringing to mind some kind of primitive sacrifice as seen by the victim...
...throughout, but puns and word games (unfortunately badly translated) shade into black humor which at the novel's end becomes a Kafkaesque surrealism that we find frightening rather than funny. Sartre, who was a real-life friend of Vian's, is amusingly satirized as Jean-Sol Partre, the cult idol who enters packed lecture halls on elephant back, crushing his waiting fans. But when Chick, Colin's friend, sacrifices everything, including his girl-friend Alise, in order to buy Partre's work, the joke turns grisly. Chloe dies from a water-lily growing in her lungs: this is both Vian...