Word: novelizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...level, the novel contains a series of knowing winks to Hawthorne's novel. Updike holds back from calling the novel A after the famous red letter which symbolized adultery and was emblazoned on Hester Prynne's dress. But he does send the adulterous Mrs. Worth to live in an A-frame house on an ashram in Arizona with a man named Ahrat. Updike, though, is not merely referring to that earlier novel, he is modernizing...
Updike's letter of choice is "S", for sex. The switch reflects the irrelevance of sin in the modern world. Extramarital sex violates no norms, it's simply an act. The novel takes Sarah Worth out of a suburban sterility as arid as any Arizona desert and into a empty series of heterosexual and homosexual love affairs. We are even provided with an actual transcription of her first sexual encounter with the Ahrat, courtesy of a miniaturized tape recorder fastened to her breast. The endless repetition of these erotic adventures strips them of any moral aspect...
...Updike plays with the narrative ofThe Scarlet Letter, he also experiments with its voice. Hawthorne spoke about Hester Prynne by narrating her story. Updike allows Sarah to speak for herself by assuming her voice in as direct a way as possible. As an epistolary novel, S. enables Updike to be privy to Sarah's psyche, whether she is addressing her accountant, her dentist, her hairdresser or her family...
...hasn't forgotten to return an occasional book to the library? But Gustav Hasford may have overdone it. Hasford is an Academy Award nominee for his work in adapting his 1979 Viet Nam War novel, The Short-Timers, into Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket. He was wanted last week by campus police at the California Polytechnic State University, who had discovered nearly 10,000 library books, including seven overdue from Cal Poly, in storage lockers Hasford rented in San Luis Obispo. The books came from libraries as far afield as Australia...
...near term, the future of the second wave will involve novel applications built with existing software technology such as frames and rules. It has already produced some unanticipated benefits. Companies have discovered, for example, that their engineers use the technology as a reasoning tool. While in the past they would tell a programmer what they wanted in the way of a computer application and hope for the best, now they are creating prototypes for their own systems, then fiddling with them until they are right...