Word: surrealization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...grinning, continuing the lookout. Despite the battlefield small-talk and virtual siege-mentality that permeated the Shoreham, N.Y., nuclear power plant, June 3 was a day for handcuffs made of clear plastic rather than sharp metal, for mostly friendly rapport between arresters and arrestees that one demonstrator called "surreal," for a day of protest that mixed earnestness and euphoria but, except for one incident of dubious origin, excluded confrontation...
Higgins, author of the minor classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), still knows how to place surreal descriptions in the dialogue of his characters: "Marian looked like a small horse, perhaps a pony, who had read Vogue and believed it." And he has not lost his conductor's ear for the music and lilt of Boston Irish patois. Here the punch lines are stronger than the plot lines, but Higgins' characters are so shrewdly observed by Year's end, as Edgar confronts Peter, that it is impossible to disagree with his summary...
...open road, the long procession of gas stations relentlessly shut down and the gauge's needle sinking like the setting sun toward Empty. If at last a gas line appears, winding up the road a quarter of a mile to an oasis of heraldic light, the effect is surreal: the machines in their idling file give off an almost animal heat, the drivers waiting inside them feeling anxious, vaguely betrayed (by Detroit, Carter, Schlesinger, OPEC, history) and sometimes alarmingly close to the Hobbesian state of nature...
...Government has long since subsumed science and technology into its realm, both as the fountainhead of its projects and as an object of its regulation. The calculations that measure national military strength are as impenetrable to the civilian-on-the-street as the formulas of the ancient alchemists. The surreal arithmetic of SALT might as well be the music of the spheres, for all the help it gives ordinary folks trying to get a clear picture of the country's real and relative strengths. The nervous strategist is not the only one to covet verification; the common citizen could...
...scene at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco was vaguely surreal. In the pews was an audience of 1,500, sedate as any churchgoers. Ranged about them in a huge semicircle was a gleaming array of 80 trombonists, as if a parade had lost its way and sought sanctuary...