Word: pendulums
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Alternating Phases. Parkinson's thesis is that the whole of civilized history can be reduced to the confrontation of the East and West, with "alternating phases of Oriental and Western ascendancy." The West set the pendulum in motion with the capture of Troy in about 1250 B.C., which launched the Greeks' thrust into Asia Minor. Since that time, the East has rebounded with two long periods of ascendancy-one following the Persian conquests under Darius (522 B.C.), the other from roughly A.D. 400 to 1000, when Buddhism was sweeping Asia and Europe was plunged in the Dark Ages...
...thing Mexicans could be fairly certain of was that the new man would be slightly right of center. By long tradition, Mexico's Presidents follow a political pendulum-right, left, right-and López Mateos calls himself "left within the constitution." He nationalized and subdivided some 30 mil lion acres of land during his five years in office, bought out private power companies, nationalized the nation's cinemas. All the while, however, he tried to industrialize Mexico and encourage the creation of private capital. Reflecting this, his Cabinet was filled with men who stood to the right...
Rosy Hieroglyphs. "From 1921 on," wrote Stella in his Autobiographical Notes, "I was swinging as a pendulum from one subject to the opposite . . . I complied without any reserve with every genuine appeal to my artistic faculties, trampling those infantile barricades of the self-appointed dictators infesting the art fields." He glued together tiny collages, which he called Naturelles-accidental impastos of tissue paper, newsprint, and cardboard stamped with the tread of automobile tires or feet-in an uncanny anticipation of abstract expressionism. He took up wax crayons to create richly colored tropical scenes: surrealist flowers as big as hybrid corn...
However far the pendulum of Stella's art swung, it always swung back to his romance with his beloved symbol of American technology. As late as 1939, seven years before his death, he revisited the awesome girders of the Brooklyn Bridge and once again painted its steel swoop spanning not only river but the wider barriers of sea, continent and man's soul...
...Advocate did not plan this issue around a single theme, but the magazine's tone is consistent. The tone has to do with sex--sloppy sex. If there is a puddle school of Cambridge photography, there seems also to be a crotch school of Cambridge writing. The old pendulum of emphasis has swung with a vengeance in the past few decades from Victorian modesty to paperback love; it has not been a desirable move. A passage like, "I learned my first great lesson in love one afternoon when I came upon my mother curled in a corner of a basement...