Word: mattress
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...late '60s and early '70s, the spine-cracked paperback editions of Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Magister Ludi) stood in a haphazard pile beside every mattress on the floor, next to the roach clips and Earth Shoes. The American counterculture claimed the Swabian mystic as a guru of its own discovery, its subterranean priest. That was perhaps an instructive case of self-absorbed audience imitating self-obsessed author. In fact, Hesse during his astonishingly long career had been appropriated by three other generations (in Germany, anyway) as their own secret voice. Hesse possessed a strange, lifelong affinity for adolescents...
Mohammed Amini, 33, the son of a Tehran mattress maker, supports his wife and daughter by driving a heavy Mercedes truck. On runs that may take him as far as Turkey or even West Germany, he likes to shove a cassette into the tape deck on his dashboard to listen to his favorite commentator: Ayatullah Khomeini...
...back into this camp. I had been insulated from extreme poverty before because I lived in one of the settlements. This man lived in a traditional round mud constructed hogan, with no windows, a hole in the roof to let out smoke and let in light, and an old mattress on the floor for a bed. The ceremony he did with me involved my humbling myself before all of nature, and truly feeling, through intensive prayer and meditiation, that all nature, all existence, is interdependant; and man is only one simple humble part of all of it--not the center...
...Cambridge Fire Department, summoned by the University Police, arrived, cut open the mattress and extinguished the fire...
...Stanley Kotowski of the fire department said the mattress could have suddenly burst into flames at any moment, and added the smoke from the mattress could have been very dangerous...