Word: maginot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Barth knows. No novel has displayed such an elaborate Maginot Line of prepared defenses since Joyce had Stuart Gilbert write a whole book under his "supervision" to explicate Ulysses. Barth demands that Joycean parallel. You could spend a month, a year, maybe a life detecting patterns within patterns in Ulysses; at the end you might look back and wonder why you bothered, but at least you'd have met thousands of smart people along the way. You can spend the same time with Letters and find equally pleasing patterns, but then look over your shoulder and your only company...
...article on NATO [Dec. 11], I could not help thinking that I had heard it all before. The confident bluster, the statistics, the little soldier having his say, etc. Then it dawned on me. When I was very young, I heard just about the same claptrap about the awesome Maginot and Siegfried lines-and we all know just how useful they turned out to be as defenses against a determined and ideologically motivated enemy. Perhaps the only hope lies in men like General Haig, who is only "cautiously optimistic"-and no more...
Throughout the week West German police pressed their search for 16 terrorists wanted in connection with the Lufthansa skyjacking and Schleyer's kidnap-murder. Across the border French police were combing the area around Mulhouse-including the surviving concrete bunkers of World War II's Maginot Line, which would make excellent hiding places in the dense forests of Alsace...
...frets about the decline of his scholarly class. The true intellectual is a dying breed, he implies, and he offers himself as a Maginot Line in its defense...
...South is space, light, trees, the sun. The South is mediocrity, violence, boosterism, glorified ignorance. It is friendliness and a joy in simple pleasures -and simple ideas. It is row upon row of churches, Maginot-like bastions against the Forces of Darkness. It is the Darkness as well: a lust for guilty, drunken excess. And, perhaps most memorably, the South is sudden visions of Eden, like crossing the Black Warrior River in Alabama at dusk and looking down to see the Peaceable Kingdom, painted in gold and rust...