Word: things
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...studied The Flight to Lucifer with the care the author devoted to Blake and others, it might yield allusions, internal consistency, and lots of symbolic geometry. But Bloom doesn't make the effort attractive enough; his book lacks any felicities of description, characterization or narrative. For one thing, its 52 chapters, each four to six pages long, leave no room for any sort of rhythm in the plot. Even worse, the book's brevity makes a mockery of its epic pretensions...
...voices that lapse into parallel monologues and back again. None really work, although "The New Music," an allegory of lost innocence and hopes of renewal, comes closest. As Samuel Johnson pointed out, stories must be readable before anything else; Barthelme instead gives us ghosts chattering non sequitus. The great thing about the book is that you can flip six or seven pages and not even notice. Consider this passage from the opening of "The Crisis...
...sitting in my brand-new Butler building surrounded by steel of high quality folded at ninety degree angles. The only thing prettier than ladies as an I-beam painted bright yellow. I told 'em I wanted a big door. A big door in front where a girl could hide her car if she wanted to evade the gaze of her husband the rat poison salesman. You ever been out with a ratpoison salesman? They are fine fellows with little red eyes...
...least these whales are alive. And that's the key thing about the Aquarium. The fish may look funny, and 43 members of the Ethan Allen grammar school third grade class may look even funnier, but when you go there you see things that you just can't anywhere else. That you may never see again...
...protest. The chief issue: charges of racism by Dartmouth's black students and other minorities, who hurled black and red paint at the traditional Winter Carnival Ice Sculpture. "Without tearing something up or hurting someone," said Black Student Leader Donald O'Bannon, "it was the most dramatic thing we could...