Word: perseid
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Chimera is a coy variation on a number of Barth's favorite themes. Composed in three parts, "Dunyaza-diad," "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad," the book is largely a gag at the expense of conventional literary forms. Instead of having characters symbolize archetypes as most novelists do, Barth uses the archetypes themselves as characters. Fortunately for the reader, Barth -who is also an English professor at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York -provides a pony. (Pegasus by any name is just as helpful.) As he explains in Chimera: "Since myths themselves are among other things poetic distillations...
...favorite of the gods. Barth renders Bellerophon's adventures into a dizzying situation comedy in which metaphors are homogenized and characters recede into their own stories and reappear so that the middle of one man's tale could be another's beginning or ending. Both "Perseid" and "Bellerophoniad" spin on little else than the axis of Barth's cleverness, and both wobble badly...
...history has not been struck by (i. e., has not attracted) a planetesimal. But each day at least one meteorite lands, and 20,000,000 chondrulites whiz into the earth's atmosphere. They are the shooting stars seen most often in November (the Leonid shower), in August (the Perseid shower) and in April (the Lyrid shower...