Word: sideshows
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Like many popular zoologists, the author is sometimes tempted to play the Barnum of biology, and then he runs an occupational risk: to demonstrate that nature is not merely a catalogue of forms, he is tempted to set it up as a sideshow of freaks. Naturalist Wendt is preserved from this pitfall by his almost religious feeling for the mystery of life and its stupendous labor of evolution-a feeling perhaps most plainly and profoundly expressed by Spinoza: "The more man understands individual objects, the more he understands...
...trademark, Mr. Corso and Mr. Ginsberg read extensively from alternately long and short poems, with Mr. Corso showing a much stronger tendency towards humor in his writing than did Mr. Ginsberg. The latter, to the considerable surprise of most of the audience, which had come in search of a sideshow, was an unexpectedly "serious" poet, especially in the long prose poem, Kaddish, and in the well-known Howl with which he ended his reading...
...theater in any form fills the theater section of the Houghton stacks. Old poster and playbills of Kean and Booth, the playbill for the Ford theater on the night of Lincoln's assassination, are some notable examples. One piece, P.T. Barnum's first advertisement, tells of his original sideshow: "Joice Heth . . . born on the island of Madagascar on the coast of Africa in 1674 who has now arrived at the astronomical age of 161 years...
...Archibald MacLeish's re-enactment in a contemporary setting of the Book of Job. It is also a restatement of it, and, in a double sense, it is a theater piece. The action takes place inside a night-lit circus tent where a sideshow Job has been performing. Two out-of-work actors, Mr. Zuss and Nickles, toy with the Biblical masks of God and Satan they find lying around, and try speaking the roles. Suddenly they are aware of a voice from outside them, are caught up in a story near at hand...
...that a mark (sucker) got much for his money when he bought a ticket (50? for adults, 30? for kids) to Lew Alter's sideshow. It cost an extra dime to see the "Pickled Punk" (two questionable sets of Siamese twins preserved in formaldehyde), another quarter for a glimpse of Carmelita, the "Hermaphrodite." ("Ladies on one side of the curtain, please, and the gentlemen on the other. Wives may stand with their husbands.") Following the colonel himself past the animal cages was an olfactory experience. Living in a trailer with Devil, the two-nosed dog, a spider monkey named...