Word: unreality
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...with the P. A. system. "Will the man with the black briefcase with the initials L. O. B. please identify himself," she said. They're onto something, I thought. They never say things like that unless they're onto something. I had it in a minute-Havana. It sounded unreal, but I was sure that if we only made it off the ground, we'd be there in a matter of hours. After two years of selling out by air I would be in the tropics, among a whole new breed of people, in the home of the real revolution...
There is no glossing over the facts of Lahr's private life, for instance. But it is so flecked with tragedy as to seem almost unreal. This is how it went: At the start, a poor Bronx childhood, dropout from school, succession of odd jobs and petty thieving. Then Lahr tries burlesque just for fun and is hooked ("I would have done 20 shows a day. It was like a shot of -dope? Adrenalin?"). He rises to vaudeville, lives with and eventually marries his act partner, reaches Broadway while at home his wife is going insane ("She laughed...
...history we learn is vertical, intellectual and clear; hence unreal. Can we study history horizontally, affectively and chaotically...
...know if it is because institutions seem to be crumbling about us, or because what happened in the past appears embarrassing, but this book strikes me as very unreal. The Advocate simply isn't like that any more. These earnest poems, this heritage! To think that all these distant figures were great, that we too may become like them. What seems so impossible to us now is that anything could have happened to damage them. Their names, engraved in faint gold lettering on wooden plaques, crowd the walls of the Sanctum on the second floor of our House...
...mixture of reformist zeal and conservatism, of distrust of Government interference and insistence on Government help, are not unique to California. But it does lend California politics an especially unreal air. As visitors so often note, this sense of the unreal is everywhere: from the packaging of political candidates to the packaging of death at Forest Lawn, from Hollywood emotions to the plastic flowers and the trashcans that are disguised to look like tree trunks. These suggest the popular California metaphor: the world as euphemism. Something slightly disguised here, contrived there. And yet, and always, throughout the state there...