Word: leathering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...antique sets. At the Ministry of Truth, no one has ever heard of the microchip. The height of sophisticated communication is represented by the pneumatic tube and the dial phone. And when O'Brien tortures Winston into submissiveness to the state, his instruments are the old-fashioned table with leather straps and electroshock. All of this matches perfectly the external world through which Winston and Julia stumble: it looks like a vast, bombed- out housing development. Cameron thus carefully upsets our common visual assumptions about things to come. With antiseptic cliches banished, we are forced to confront a basic truth...
Afros, pony-tails, goatees, leather jackets, funny-looking shoes, Trotsky glasses, foul smells, guitars, pot fumes, couples of all sexual peculiarities making out, women nursing babies. It was all there...
...another student maintain that Cooperman, who was married and the father of two teen-age daughters, gave studded leather jackets to several of his male Vietnamese students and liked to wrestle with them on his office floor. In his office police found homosexual magazines and photos of Cooperman with provocatively dressed young Asian men. Lam says he once asked Cooperman why he did not simply stop working on behalf of Viet Nam. "I can't," Cooperman reportedly replied. "It's too late and I'm in too deep...
Father: No. We need you to keep us in shoe leather. Off you go down to the factory. I'm for a pint...
...other stories in the collection, two are standard imponderables, vaguely suggesting those irritating fictional non sequiturs of Donald Barthelme that prove without effort that the world is a strange place. The last short piece is called The Leather Man, after a strange tramp who wandered southern New England in the 19th century, insulated from the world by an outer leather armor he had devised. It is an awkward tale that works only intellectually, as an argument the author is having with himself. Is it possible that a life can be understood only when one has deliberately estranged oneself from...