Word: shamanism
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Showman or Shaman. In her last years, Aimee shrewdly retouched her public image by sending about 2,000,000 Bibles to servicemen and calling down biblical plagues on the Axis powers ("How many of you would like to see Hitler covered with boils from head to foot?") But her heart really wasn't in it any more, and on Sept. 27, 1944, she died of an overdose of barbiturates...
Suicide? Even in death Aimee kept the public guessing. That was her style-and perhaps her privilege. It should hardly be a biographer's privilege, but Thomas claims it. He chooses to see her as a showman; but she was also a shaman, one of the charged and chosen few in whom the divine and the demonic hold alarming dialogue. There was a chance here to deep-psych a deplorable genius and put calipers to the phenomenon of religious fervor. Because Thomas passed it up, Aimee emerges as a personality who overflows the scope of the book...
...printed on his chest. "Well alright," he shouts at the audience, looking the perverse offspring of a Rimbaud or a Wilde, and like a voodoo prince he pumps his hips twice and begins to dance. Pouting, leering, his fat lips flapping, his eyes hopped in derision, he is the shaman, the witch we have waited for, the King Kong monster. The audience is left contemplating the mask of a primitive...
...shaman of the Beat Generation, Kerouac was a forebear of today's hippie and radical counterculture. But he would not or could not translate himself into the '60s. A little before he died last week at 47, Kerouac was muttering at both straight society and the rebellious young, the military-industrial complex and the Viet Cong. "You can't fight city hall," he wrote. "It keeps changing its name." It would be too easy to believe that all of today's radical young will slip into cantankerous conservatism. But some undoubtedly will. It may be that...
...some of which have also been published in his homeland. Evtushenko writes sadly of a trip to an Alaska fur farm (He who's conceived in a cage will weep for a cage); sharply of famous people (Allen Ginsberg-cagey prophet-baboon -thumps his hairy chest as a shaman thumps a tambourine); sentimentally of his visit to a steelworker's home (I love America, the America who now sits with me). His distaste for immense, impersonal bureaucracy is suggested in Cemetery of Whales...