Word: motif
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...Motherless Brooklyn,” he has already established himself as an elite member of the community of American fiction. Where “Chronic City” falters is in its failure to adequately deal with its own extra-textual subtext.Wild animals are a repeated motif throughout the novel. A tiger that may or may not actually be some sort of digging machine rampages through the city, destroying whole buildings and causing general inconvenience. A pair of bald eagles seem to hunt Abneg, and at one point, a whale makes its way up the East River nearly to Hell?...
...lingering misgivings of evolution, a pathology of intelligence, in the best case a self-preservation manual.” The novel frames love in terms of the primitive evolutionary drive to perpetuate genes, an attitude whose approach resonates throughout much of the story. While Volpi’s motif of genes as deterministic prime-movers offers an insightful line or two, his prose otherwise lacks vigor and ingenuity. Volpi draws heavily from a repository of borrowed metaphors and personifications–riding on Conrad’s coattails to describe humans “embarking on a trip into...
There's a lot of pageantry on display at derbies, too. Veteran demolition driver Lynn Buchanan paid $600 for his mid-'70s Chevy wagon, which he decorated with an American-flag motif for the Delaware County derby. He puts a lot of hours into fixing up the clunkers he's getting ready to crash and sees the derby as a healthy way to blow off steam in stressful times. "I tell my wife, at least I'm not at the bar or doing drugs," he says. "You know where I am - in the garage turning a wrench...
...find at longhouses like Long Dungan, where 35-year-old Web designer Calvin Jemarang takes me to meet his spry 83-year-old uncle Kojan Kabeng, a sculptor and blowpiper, one of the last of a dying breed. Kojan's kitchen lintel is decorated with a radiant succubus motif, and when I ask the legend behind it - in which a hunter is seduced and eaten by a beautiful spirit - Calvin perks up; he has never heard it either. Later, at a nearby Sekapan longhouse, 35-year-old Stephen George proudly shows me an ironwood dugout that can fit 93 rowers...
...Before the April legislative election in which S.B.Y.'s Democratic Party proved its burgeoning popularity by tripling its showing from the last polls, I walked the streets of Yogyakarta in central Java, marveling at the colorful profusion of campaign posters: the red-and-white star motif of the Democrats, the black bull of Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, the green banyan tree of Kalla's Golkar Party. Taxis had their radios tuned to political talk shows, and youths on motorcycles revved their engines as they carried their chosen parties' flags through town. I knew that many of these...