Word: insights
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This theme of domestic neurosis is itself safe, familiar ground for Tyler, whose bestselling Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant portrays with warm, humorous insight, the mixed blessings of family life and its traditional values. The characters in her latest novel bear a strong resemblance to those of the earlier work in terms of their ambivalence toward home. Tyler's sympathies highlight, in particular, the eccentric habits of white middle America: middle-class, middle-aged individuals suspended between "Tips From the Beauty Stars" security measures and childish rebellion. When the glib young Julian, Macon's editor, sails into Macon's sister...
This daunting insight does not keep the hero from continuing his lonely, alert vigil. He is convinced that should he ever, miraculously, see exactly what is going on in front of his eyes, he can begin the truly important part of his mission: "Extending this knowledge to the entire universe." So he goes on watching: a pair of mating tortoises, giraffes in a zoo, the cuts of meat in a butcher shop, the ruins of a Toltec shrine in Mexico, the flight of migrant starlings in his native Rome. Even while tending the grounds of his summer home, he feels...
...after this discovery there gradually comes yet another insight that whipsaws the immigrant back toward the original perception: there really is no fixed social structure after all. There is above everything else that much vaunted mobility -- from place to place, career to career, status to status -- which turns so many native-born Americans into immigrants in their own country...
...single factor can account for the perseverance of so diverse a group. But a psychological insight is provided by Vachirin Chea, 27, a survivor of the Cambodian death camps who has prospered in banking and real estate in Lowell, Mass. "I have to be an American now," he says. "But I get my strength from being Cambodian. If I had been raised here in America, I would not have that kind of strength. All that suffering, the anger in me, is what keeps me going...
What does he do here? He experiments with the ramifications of an insight that came to him several decades ago. Paik was perhaps the first person to perceive the TV screen as a canvas and, ergo, the stream of electrons that creates images on the picture tube as paint. Presto, video art, which means scrambling, bending, rearranging or just generally messing around with the picture on TV sets. As practiced by Paik and his followers, this tinkering can lead to anything from vivid static and colorful snow to whimsical sculptures of the video age. When New York's Whitney Museum...