Word: signs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dorms are discouraging places for boys to visit. They have to be stared at by 100 girls to get to see one. All the apparatus of bells, pink slips, tags, and signing in for parietals makes it a Special Occasion every time a boy comes, when everyone would be happier if it could be Just Dropping By. Girls are supposed to yell "Man on" when they bring their visitors upstairs and put a sign on the door after they have evacuated their roommate to leering suppositions underlying these procedures put the focus on just what the authorities are presumably trying...
What happens is that the conditions of the dorm limit people's ability to make their own choices. The individual is subordinated to the rules, to the pressure of friends, to the harrassment of the crowd. The worrying about work is a sign that the individual can't find out, much less fulfill, her potentialities. Instead, she adopts the common standard and resorts to comparisons to measure her own worth. Her initiative is cut off. She needs friends to an artificially heightened degree, and the reliance on friends promotes conformity and excessive hunting for security. The group of friends that...
...even the freedom one does have, for it is hard to realize it is there. The noise of the dorm fills up the spaces and presses in on the people living there, sounds, words, commands--the voice of the public consciousness. The constricted space of plural living is a sign or sorrow. Free, open space is needed for the fortuitous and the unforeseen to occur, for the emotionally neutral and the amplitude of life everyone has a right to expect...
October 21: Despite Martin Peretz's printed comment that the Democratic National ticket was a sign of "the worst of times" in American politics, vice-presidential candidate Edmund Muskie brought his campaign to Boston. In introducing Muskie to a crowd of 3000 at B.C., John Kenneth Galbraith said that the real election issue was "Richard Nixon--not the new Nixon, not he old Nixon, but the same unreliable Nixon that we have come to know...
...GLAZIER lives in a cramped single room on the fifth floor of Kirkland House. When I first went puffing up the narrow stairway to see him, I found a plastic dime-store sign on his door that read in mock-heroic, mock-executive terms "Kenneth M. Glazier." Above the sign, a little jingle about Great men from a Chinese fortune cookie was pasted. When I entered the room to arrange an interview, he tried to pawn off his old furniture on me. And when the first interview had been set up, he cancelled it in order to take a bartending...