Word: totemic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...series begins and ends in Paris. The Eiffel Tower (1889), that "static totem of the cult of dynamism," as Host Robert Hughes calls it, is a symbol of the ebullient optimism that ushered in the new age of machine worship. The Beaubourg Center (1977), which looks like a trite and showy illustration from a science fiction magazine, becomes a symbol of the decline of that exhausted era. In between is a terra incognita that we may think we know-the art of the 20th century...
Graduate students have no priority. "They are low men on the totem pole," he said, "though most who came in received either single or standing tickets...
LOON LAKE shimmers in the dewy dawn, prose and poetry, beautiful words strung like a creeping vine in a jungle of Adirondack fir. But E. L. Doctorow's images evaporate in the sunlight. He tightly wraps the vine around his totem of America then chops at this wooden monument like a pecking bird. He hunts for seedy answers to those pregnant questions only poets ask. He wants to know who we are, where we have come from, what we look like to ourselves. He whirls in a magical helix around America's spine and in the end he finds that...
...000th generation." In 1839 the Democratic Review proclaimed with apostolic expansiveness: "Our national birth was the beginning of a new history. . .which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only." Americans have always carried their highly idealized beginning with them like a marmoreal totem. They invented themselves. That invention became their legitimizing idea, the germ of their justification...
...ages." Charles de Gaulle spoke almost lovingly of "gold, which never changes, can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality, and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value." From the biblical references to the gift of the Magi, to the modern-day totem of triumph in Olympic competition, gold holds a mystic promise. Says Smelser: "Gold resides in the subconscious of man as a tangible symbol for all the fantasies that are completely positive...