Word: surrealness
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...framed he fearful symmetry of a wide-eyed beast of prey, Tigre Royale. Where in pencil, the tiger's feet were merely misshaped ovals, in lithograph form, the cat's paws took on the stream-lined and savage spikes of track shoes. His feline groin is striped like a surreal clouded sky and reiterates the contours of the landscape...
...influence of the famous German design school, the Bauhaus, on the arts today is as apparent as the ubiquitous Volkswagen is on U.S. streets. Mushroom-topped lamps, svelte coffee pots, paintings of surreal geometries, and clean, functional buildings are associated with the Bauhaus attitude as readily as jimmies are with Boston ice cream cones. In its art work the Bauhaus mixes mysticism with the concrete. In its pedagogy it encourages imaginative thinking yet demands well-defined results. And from this composite house of arts-crafts-architecture, appeared distinct personalities like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy...
VIENTIANE, during peacetime, would have little if anything to catch the eye. However, due to the huge American presence, Vientiane today smacks of the surreal. On the street passing the Morning Bazaar amid the traditionally sparse traffic of taxis, pedal-rickshaws, and jeeps, today there are American station wagons, driven by American housewives of USAID employees, often with American children jumping around on the back seat. Driving down the main Boulevard paved with U.S. concrete, in their air-conditioned Ford Country Squire, they seem oblivious to the heat, dust, and squalor surrounding them...
...novelty of new arrivals ultimately wore off, and the prisoners settled into a routine. Frisbee and smoking grass were signal diversions. One group commenced a surreal Blow-Up basketball game with an imaginary ball. Finally, a prison warden produced the real thing. Separate latrines were established; a modest covering was provided in the one for females, a gesture labeled "sexist" by women's liberationists. Regular prisoners from the overlooking cell blocks threw down friendly gifts of oranges and tobacco. Late in the afternoon, when the wind picked up and the sun dipped behind the clouds, a city prisoner even...
Obviously this is not hot-and-breathless, burn-baby-burn writing. Unlike apocalyptic novelists, Gaines does not make the revolution happen by surreal rhetoric. He simply watches, a patient artist, a patient man, and it happens for him. When Jane, disobedient at last, walks past her plantation owner to take part in a demonstration, a code goes crack, as surely, as naturally as a root pushing up through concrete. · Melvin Maddocks