Word: wakes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...oral sex in the history of literature. (This story decidedly did not appear in The New Yorker.) For page after page a Harvard undergraduate named Wiley tries to bring his stubbornly unresponsive girlfriend to orgasm: "The whitish bubbling, the splash of her discontinuous physical response: those waves, ah, that wake rose, curled outward, bubbled, and fell. Rose, curled outward, bubbled, and fell." Little in this prose marathon is particularly erotic or offensive; it is possible for long periods of time to forget entirely what is supposed to be going on. The point of the exercise seems to be verbal ingenuity...
...contrast to such hyperpituitary passages, On the Waves opens with a comparatively terse Venetian scene: "In the churning wake of a motorboat from one of the luxury hotels, the gondola bobbed with graceful disequilibrium. The tall, thin, handsome man sitting in the gondola gripped the sides of the small wooden craft and said to his seven-year-old daughter, 'Hold on.' He thought, Gondolas are atavistic." Never mind that adjectives here are pulling more weight than they ought to bear. The real problem is the terminal apercu. Nothing that follows in this brief, intermittently charming story about...
...wake of these changes came a boom in enrollments, endowments and prestige at Catholic schools. The University of Notre Dame, once known mainly as a football factory, now boasts that 80% of its undergraduates were in the top 10% of their high school class. Georgetown, where 40% of the student body is non-Catholic, can afford to reject more than three-quarters of its applicants. Catholic universities, says Father Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame, are "first-rate and getting better...
...diverse textual sources for the narrative, Cage said, ranged from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake to a recent copy of The New York Times. After selecting a number of excerpts from the various sources, he said he fed them into a computer and "chance operations were used...
After the kitchens had closed for the night, our four-hour dinner party finally broke up, leaving in its wake two empty six-packs and these memories...