Word: symbolization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Brian Aldiss has apparently been dropping acid since I last read him, and, more importantly, he happens to be turning his visions (somehow, a nicer word than hallucinations) into excellent prose. In "The Serpent of Kundalini" he turns a literary trick I have never seen before; he sketches a symbol so vividly that the concept behind it is assimilated long before it is explicitly stated. The symbol is a sort of paper-bag human frame crumpling at various points in the story, and the concept is that of an alternative not take, one of our potential selves that begins...
Critics argue that U.S. efforts to isolate China have merely given the Communists a unifying and strengthening hate symbol-and spurred more subversion. Some regard the U.S. presence in Viet Nam as a particular blunder, because it may have weakened Viet Nam's historical role as a buffer against Chinese expansion. There is one theory that the U.S. should have let Ho Chi Minh unify Viet Nam and emerge as an anti-Chinese Asian Tito. This may be fantasy. Still, U.S. intervention may have helped to draw the Chinese into the war. The material aid that Peking has furnished...
Last week those questions were painfully dramatized at City College of New York, a longtime symbol of salvation for bright, needy students. In recent years, rising applications have forced tuition-free C.C.N.Y. to raise its admission standards ever higher. Meantime, poor Negroes and Puerto Ricans (now a majority in New York's public schools) have filled the slum high schools that once helped to feed the college. Lacking the stimulus of middle-class whites, who have moved elsewhere, the feeder schools have deteriorated. Despite huge enrollments, some of them now graduate as few as 15 college-qualified students...
Utah, the other beach on which U.S. forces landed, is even bleaker than Omaha: a vast expanse of windswept dunes and scrub grass. To Mayor Michel de Vallavielle of nearby Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, the beach is an almost personal possession. "It remains the symbol of liberation," he says. On June 6, 1944, De Vallavielle was mistakenly shot and wounded by American paratroopers, but it did not affect his gratitude to the liberators. Over the years, he has built a small museum in a blockhouse and has seen to it that the original wooden markers naming local roads and paths...
...years ago, one official was outraged. Describing the work as a "rusting junk heap," Alderman John Hoellen demanded in a resolution to the city council that it be dismantled. In all seriousness, he suggested replacing it with a 50-ft. statue of that modern folk hero and living symbol of a "vibrant city": Chicago Cub Infielder Ernie Banks...