Word: lava
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Those who knew Janis Joplin only from her records can be forgiven for wondering quite what the fuss was about. It could not be communicated fully on records-the burning lava flow of energy raising audiences to their feet and into the aisles. But for those who saw her perform even once, it was not easy to forget the gyrating girl in a glowworm mini, all surging emotion boiling up through swirls of curses and Southern Comfort in a Dixie cup. Or the single vivid impression recorded in the mind's eye that, without the scalding voice and tremulous...
...most provocative thinkers in the West. Gracefully, lucidly, he talks of topics as diverse as the rebellion of modern youth ("an explosion of despair"), the art of Marcel Duchamp, Sade's philosophy ("His model is not a volcano, although he liked volcanoes very much, but cold lava"). Paz even notes the first feminist, Penthesilea, legendary queen of the Amazons, who ruled from "a throne of vertigo and tides...
...Juan, the drugs drew Castaneda into one frightful or ecstatic confrontation after another. After chewing peyote buttons Castaneda met Mescalito successively as a black dog, a column of singing light, and a cricketlike being with a green warty head. He heard awesome and uninterpretable rumbles from the dead lava hills. After smoking humito and talking to a bilingual coyote, he saw the "guardian of the other world" rise before him as a hundred-foot-high gnat with spiky tufted hair and drooling jaws. After rubbing his body with an unguent made from datura, the terrified anthropologist experienced all the sensations...
Indeed, though the man is an enigma wrapped in mystery wrapped in a tortilla, the work is beautifully lucid. Castaneda's story unfolds with a narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies. Its terrain?studded with organ-pipe cacti, from the glittering lava massifs of the Mexican desert to the ramshackle interior of Don Juan's shack?becomes perfectly real. In detail, it is as thoroughly articulated a world as, say, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. In all the books, but especially in Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda makes the reader experience the pressure of mysterious winds and the shiver of leaves...
Last week the people of Heimaey awoke in the middle of the night to find that the Helgafell volcano, dormant for 5,000 years, had exploded on their doorstep. As the earth rumbled like thunder and showers of molten lava lit up the sky, villagers in night clothes poured into the streets to watch the terrifying spectacle. After one home was engulfed by boiling lava and hot ashes began to rain down on others, Heimaey's 5,200 residents were ordered evacuated...