Word: odyssey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Described as "innerspace fiction," the book treats the stay in a psychiatric hospital of Charles Watkins, 50, a classics professor, who was picked up rambling and confused near London's Waterloo Bridge at midnight, under the impression that he had survived an odyssey as bizarre as anything out of Homer. Watkins fights to remember his visions, which involve legendary yellow beasts as well as the great white bird, and a bloody, obscene war between a species of monkeys and "rat-dogs." Doctors X and Y try to make him remember his wife, his family, his name and occupation-what...
...when "one followed the line of one's sexual impulse without a backward look at what was moral, responsible or remotely desirable for society." Millett's "critical misdemeanor" with Lawrence is treating him out of sequence "to conceal the pilgrimage, hide the life, cover over that emotional odyssey which took him from adoration of the woman to outright lust for her murder, then took him back to worship her beauty, even her procreative beauty...
...project himself 'extraordinary distances through a narrow path. He's disciplined, stoical, able to become the instrument of his own will, has extraordinary boldness and daring together with a resolute lack of imagination. He's profoundly nihilistic. And this nihilism found its perfect expression in the odyssey to the moon-because we went there without knowing why we went...
...Arthur Clarke's space odyssey 2001, the most intriguing character is not flesh and blood but an extraordinary computer called HAL (for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer). Amazingly lifelike, HAL speaks with flawless diction, calmly disposes of almost any problem and-when it turns "psychotic"-does the same to most of the human crew. Could Clarke's fantasy also be prophecy? Perhaps. In a chilling augury of the cybernetic future, scientists at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have now created a computer that in some ways approaches HAL's versatility. In at least one vital respect...
...Levin really cares about his students," he said. "He's a magnificent teacher. And Finley (who taught half of Hum 2 at the time) is one of the reasons I'm in classics. I've never heard a better lecturer than Finley on 'The Odyssey...