Word: kites
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...truth that often is close to surrealism. He has done a beautiful silver sculpture of an old lady's hand, which he placed in a fading plush box and gave the title Tradition. There is a dumpy dwarf called Uncle Sam, and an extraordinarily graceful Man with a Kite. Durchanek has also done a robust George Washington, who gazes in bewilderment at a large falcon chained to his wrist. This, he explains, is the way Washington might react if he came back to America today. "I wonder what he would say. He might say, 'My, my, what...
Chronic curiosity led Benjamin Franklin to fly a kite into a thunderstorm-he got a mild shock and proof that lightning is electrical. A year later, a Russian professor tried the experiment and was killed by a bolt of lightning that passed through his head. Safely insulated scientists have tried to duplicate Franklin's trick, hopeful that they can learn to cause lightning at will. But by last week even the U.S. Department of Defense was convinced that it is no small stunt to lure lightning out of a passing cloud...
...Franklin's Kite. The 17th century is the great divide, as Steiner sees it. After that, tragedy is doomed by a triple decadence-the decline of the word, the myth, and the audience. Verse succumbed to prose, and prose itself, Steiner feels, is now debased, stale and lackluster. Both the Greek myths and Christian values were ravaged by rationalism. In tragedy, "lightning is a messenger. But it can no longer be so once Benjamin Franklin has flown a kite to it." The audience changed most of all. The rising middle class was not interested in the fall of princes...
...their own nations; and if Castro has perverted the cause of social reform, they are still on the side of reform. Some doggedly stand by the principle of nonintervention in other states. Nearly all have their own good reasons for not appearing to be the tail on the U.S. kite...
Anne Miner's timothy in love is much better than her last published work; Deborah Eibel's Elderly Hostess reads like a vaguely interesting passage of prose chopped up and strung down the page in small pieces (like the tail of a kite); David Berman's Meletus in the Provinces evinces a competence which is entirely devoid of charm or excitement...