Word: parallelism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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NONFICTION: Chinese Shadows, Simon Leys -The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh,edited by Michael Davie Parallel Botany, Leo Lionni -Ring, Jonathan Yardley -The River Congo, Peter Forbath
...PARALLEL BOTANY by Leo Lionni...
...Lionni, 67, teacher, painter, sculptor, former art director of FORTUNE and author of a dozen delightful children's books. To illustrate, Lionni has literalized Marianne Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them"-and then removed the toads. What remains is a series of never-were "parallel plants," a vegetable kingdom with members rooted beyond the fences of nature and logic...
...Parallel Botany is the most complete (and only) full-scale guide to this large, bizarre, highly diversified and totally imaginary world. It is also one of the funniest and most brilliant parodies of scientific jargon and scholarship ever published. Standard verdure grows and decays; Lionni's plants do neither. Instead, writes Lionni, they exist outside of time, "like a memory that has taken on actuality." These matterless, insubstantial greens, he notes, "though impervious to any violent acts of nature, disintegrate at the least contact with an object alien to their normal environment, dissolving into dust and leaving only...
...parallel is not overlooked by Protestant extremists, who use it to justify their claims of Catholic disloyalty and subversion. Catholic demands for civil rights and economic parity are therefore easily dismissed by Protestants, not so much out of disbelief, as out of an unyielding conviction that any concession moves Ulster closer to Irish unification. The great fear of the Protestants is "Rome Rule," the religious tyranny and destruction of democracy they consider synonymous with Catholic rule. In its insistence on controlling many aspects of Catholic life, including its positions on divorce and birth control, and in the special relation...