Word: unbidden
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ruin of the middle distance. His claims were modest. He asked only for a hearing -- say, between cleaning up after supper and getting ready for bed, a few moments' attention to a poet speaking as if speech could still alter society and the perception of hours. On his birthday, unbidden, hundreds and perhaps thousands will give him an audience. Nothing has changed for these solitary readers, who have been massing over the years and decades. Some, indeed, may not know that he is gone and that one of his more memorable lines has become self-descriptive: "The communication...
...Reagans' enthusiasm for astrology comes as a small, slightly goofy revelation, an old Hollywood side of them that has turned up in Washington, a detail endearing and unbidden and embarrassing. Ronald Reagan has always been a lucky man. Perhaps he and his wife find that the zodiac is a means to codify, organize and predict his luck. Movie stars are suckers for astrology, partly because their business is even less rational than the rest of American life. Great egos need great horoscopes...
Womanizing was a side of Kennedy too: Did Hart take emulation that far? Yet one could also detect in Hart some unbidden traces of Richard Nixon. Some Americans sensed a troubling vibration in Gary Hart that was difficult to describe, but that rang wrong. Hart may be right to be bitter about the amateur psychiatry that has been practiced upon him. Still, Americans have fairly sensitive instruments of perception. Hart said last week that it was issues that gave him his "link" to the American people, a strange conceptual way of putting it -- as if he knew that...
...graphs which make it difficult to digest." A five-volume History of Bitic Literature is conveniently boiled down to prefaces from the first and second editions. They trace the evolution of the computer from a programmed and hence "unthinking" machine into a dazzling array of autonomous intelligences, producing unbidden works of literature, "bitic texts which in varying degrees are unintelligible to humans...
...LIES in peaceful quiet sleep, A vision came unbidden to his head: He saw the birds that fly, the beasts that creep, He saw the teeming living and the dead. Surveying all, he looked first to the north And at the pole, he caught sight of a gleam; A Cadillac in chrome was riding forth, Pulled by a twelve-man transition team. "What can this mean?" asks Bok of his stern guide, Who answers thus in Slavic-sounding voice: "This year a new man takes the Yuletide ride, Delivering gifts to rich and poor--rejoice!" Bok looks puzzled, turns...