Word: petition
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...Petit Bourgeois. At the time he finished Journey, Celine, born Louis-Ferdinand Detouches, was nearly 40. A doctor, he worked the night shift at the municipal clinic in the poor district of Clichy, attending to prostitutes and alcoholics and patching up men smashed in street fights. Nobody looked less like a novelist. "A big devil with an inscrutable face and a scornful mouth," he reminded acquaintances of "a cafe owner on holiday...
...Comedy he was working on at his death. Pasolini always wrote in parables, but in his later work his symbols become estranged from any reality. "The Divine Mimesis" is full of wornout catchphrases of the Italian left; the souls Pasolini-Dante meets in his Inferno are "conformisti piccolo-borghesi" (petit-bourgeois conformists), and their sins are "il conformismo," "la volgarita," "la moralita." Pasolini always had a fondness for the antithesis, for the oxymoron; but in his recent writings the language degenerates into phrases that are cliches before they are coined: "the masses have chosen as their religion the condition...
...never allowed to forget it. Archie Peltier, an artist from Minneapolis, was responsible for most of the engineering, and his handiwork is impressive. People can walk up inside the Ruckus World Trade Center, looking at its "tenants," finally meeting a diminutive figure of the funambulist Philippe Petit walking the rope between the towers...
Actors' Showcase. Age has not refined Sweet Bird's effulgent bathos. The reduction of personality to sex organs is the dynamic of skin flicks and soap op era. Sad to say, Williams wrote this Petit Guignol sideshow in the late '50s, soon after completing his masterpiece, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Today it seems fatally misconceived, a sentimental melodrama instead of a savage, black comedy on southern mores...
...seventies--producing many college trained cab drivers and dishwashers-- has not encouraged educated workers and students to organize against capital, nor has their education given them more humanistic values than their less-educated blue collar counterparts. The threat of further downward mobility has thrown students back to a petit bourgeois outlook. At more exclusive colleges like Harvard, the "new mood on campus" stands as a polite metaphor for a new isolation and an increased competition for the few types of work that are still independent...