Word: mosaicism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There was a time, barely a year ago, when Mosaic was packed with lame fiction and sickly personal essays that all suffered from the same fault. Very few writers discussed matters relevant to their experience at Harvard; instead they sought "genuine" Jewish material and produced stories about shtetl culture or essays about "chasidism for today's youth." They looked back to the Central European world of their grandparents and proved, by the meager quality of their work, that Kasrilevkeh cannot inspire someone who was never there...
...other hand, those of us who enjoy his work ought to be able to explain why. Unfortunately, most favorable critics slaver with adjectives, like the Brattle brochure, which tells us that Le Amiche has "great visual elegance", that it is "social criticism of a Marxist order ... constructed from a mosaic of incidents trivial and tragic ... I'univers antonionien--arid, alienated, isolated...
Birdie begins well enough by turning the screen into a mosaic of telephoning teen-agers ("Hello, Mrs. Miller, this is Harvey Johnson, can I speak to Deborah Sue?") that climaxes with every kid in town chattering into enough Princess phones to make A.T. & T. swoon with pride. The arrival of Conrad Birdie in Sweet Apple to plant a symbolic farewell kiss on a local teen-ager (Ann-Margret) before joining the Army is a gas. Platoons of maidens march with placards reading "Spare HIM, Take Me," and Conrad (Jesse Pearson) rides his motorcycle, rough-tired, right up the steps...
Some of the world's most spectacular slums smudge the green mountainsides above Rio's crescent beaches, mosaic sidewalks and balconied hotels. Cariocas call them favelas, and there are 251 such slums in Rio with a population of 900,000. All year long the favelas are the city's blight; cops venture through some of them in cautious pairs by day, clear out altogether at night. But one night a year-the second night of pre-Lenten Carnival-the poverty-ridden, hungry world of shacks brings Rio a matchless show of gaudy costumes, music, dancing and gaiety...
...worthwhile elements of a student's education can be writing for or editing a magazine or newspaper. But Harvard is changing, academic standards are rising, the number of students able or willing to devote a great deal of time to outside activities is dwindling rapidly. Magazines like Cambridge 38, Mosaic, or Comment, which publish relatively infrequently and encompass a wide range of topics, can provide the experience of publication for students who have limited free time, and perhaps the desire to write only about limited things...