Word: laoco
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...illegitimate childbirth in the street, a scene full of authentic Faulknerian gore. Author Stone is expert at suggesting the blend of revival-meeting urgency, circus gaiety, and kith-and-kin intimacy that flavors rural Southern politics. But the serpentine twists and turns of logic in his novel would tax Laocoön on a good wrestling day. There is a baffling subplot about a priggish schoolteacher and his nymphomaniac wife, who farms out her favors on a faded billiard table. Though the teacher is unnerved by a hint of scandal, he spends most of his time goading his wife into...
...cell, basic unit of life, presented by Kalamazoo's Upjohn Co. Its shell was a fantastic latticework of clear plastic tubes. Inside were equally ingenious, sausage-shaped plastic gadgets representing mitochondria and fat globules. There was also a gaudy red nucleus, like a gang of tortured octopuses outdoing Laocoön's serpents, with centrosomes that made it look as though it had just landed from outer space...
Four and a half centuries have passed since Roman archaeologists uncovered the famed Laocoön sculpture, a huge, powerful work of marble showing the death of a Trojan priest and his two sons (who were sentenced by Athena to be crushed by serpents because Laocoön had warned against the Trojan horse). Placed in the Vatican, the Laocoön group profoundly impressed Michelangelo, and through him shaped the art of the High Renaissance. But even the Vatican experts have long believed that their Laocoön is only a copy of the original. Last week archaeologists...
...study the find Giulio Jacopi, director of Rome's Museo del Terme, a top archaeological authority, examined the fragments and made an excited announcement: on some of them he found the Greek inscription, "Done by Agesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus," the father and sons generally credited with the original Laocoön group. Said Jacopi: "That violently twisted neck . . . that great marble foot . . . the veins on that huge hand . . . the serpent is monstrous ... I believe it is Laoco...
Only a third of the cave had been excavated by last week, and the torso of Laocoön himself was still among the missing pieces. To complicate matters, the citizens of Sperlonga were trying to keep the fragments in home ground. Thinking of tourist-trade possibilities, they rolled a five-ton rock before the cave entrance, dug a moat to frustrate approaching trucks. Still, having logic, culture and Cops all on his side, Jacopi was determined to get the entire cave excavated and the fragments transported to Rome, where they can be expertly examined and reassembled to determine whether...