Word: skinners
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What results from this greenhouse approach to writing is not so much an interpretive autobiography as the most comprehensive lab report in the history of science. In exhaustive--and exhausting--detail, we follow Skinner through a curious childhood and a lonely, almost morose, adolescence in a drab Pennsylvania town. Skinner recounts Kollege Kid pranks and personality molding teachers at Hamilton College, a year as a struggling writer, and a bohemian period in Greenwich Village...
...SKINNER wanted to write his autobiography. So, true to form, he set out to manipulate his external circumstances so as to maximize the productivity of his pen hand. He established a daily regiment: two hours of work in a room maintained at optimal temperature and humidity, at precisely the same time each morning, immediately followed by lunch, his reward. He carried a pen and pad with him at all times, and kept a tape recorder at bedside, as crutches for his fallible human memory, which might miss stray bits of "verbal behavior" that popped out at inconvenient times. He also...
...political right and left for so long. In fact, the traditional autobiographer's tools of the trade are completely lacking from this book. There are no crucial turning points, guiding-light ideals, or thematic "periods" of his life, and certainly no emotional traumas to scar the boy for life. (Skinner's only apparent reference to psychoanalysis is a dig at Freud while he describes an after school pastime--crawling into an old enclosed bookcase. "Both the isolation and the miniaturization appealed to me, but the almost fetal position was not consoling; on the contrary it was uncomfortably cramped...
...Yourself veteran, infuses a rich pathos into two laments about the hollowness of show business life, "What's Next" and "Watch the Birdie." "A Few Years," one of Barclay's most majestic numbers, begins as a take-off on blind American optimism; through the sincerity of Rod Skinner's rendition, however, it becomes a moving affirmation of the need to go on believing in America's future, despite the scars of "bigotry, of pride...
...recent article on the editorial page of The Crimson compared Wilson to Herbert Spencer and attempted to find him guilty by association. This is purely a sophomoric game, just as it would be to compare a modern geneticist of Richard Lewontin's calibre to Lamarck, or to B.F. Skinner. Even during the late sixties, when the emotional energy behind university politics was far greater, it would have been rare for the Crimson to give so much space to such an ill-informed piece. But in those days the tarring and feathering of academics--some of them indeed culpable elitists...