Word: magical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Unhappily, such moments of magic come infrequently. Imitator Lowell can quite rightly feel superior to most translators-he calls them "taxidermists" and their poems "stuffed birds." But taken entire, Imitations suffers from a certain staleness, the staleness of rebreathed...
...week's journey, from the plains of Texas to the office of President Kennedy, to the final, bewildering stopover in Manhattan. Bashir continued to drop his petals and to charm the natives. Finally, just as he was about to depart from the U.S. on his jet-propelled magic carpet ride back to Pakistan, Bashir got a telegram from Lyndon Johnson that moved him to tears. Wired L.B.J.: "Since your return to Pakistan takes you so close to Mecca, arrangements have been made through the People-to-People program for you to visit there." Cried Bashir Ahmad: "Allah be praised...
Aspiring salesmen buy The Magic Word; teen-age girls are particularly fond of The Sound of Beauty, which comes with a make-up kit. But for the all-round illiterate the new vistas are unlimited: Improve Your Etiquette; Plan the Perfect Dinner Party; Achieve Sexual Harmony in Marriage; Skin Dive; Tell Your Children the Facts of Life...
With that decision, all unwitting, she sets her foot on the road of experience that spirals down the magic mountain of childhood, down into a world without hockey, a world where she is suddenly evil and cruel as well as good and kind, where a furious mistress throws champagne in her face and a busboy (David Saire) tries to rape her and she herself in a girlish pique betrays the Englishman to the police, and only the next day discovers that she loves him. "I'll never love anyone else!" she sobs as the road seems suddenly...
Mosaic's fiction this time is pretty weak. "Adoshem," a short story by Leonard Tushnet, could have been very funny; part whimsy, part science fiction, it is the story of a Kabalist Rabbi in Brooklyn who, searching for God's name, plays around with the magic number e=mc squared until he is struck by lightning. It isn't funny, because Tushnet patronizes the old Rabbi he has created and has a sentimental realist's way of describing things in too much detail. Better written is Daniel Eigerman's "Cirrhosis to Benefit by Gala," another short story; this...