Word: whaled
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With few exceptions, the critical essays that make up most of The Vonnegut Statement are founded on the rustiest claptrap in literary exegesis. Moby Dick whale imagery, phrases like "an inversion of the objective correlative" and "eschatological imperatives" constantly threaten everyone with intellectual lockjaw. For one assistant professor, the idea of Dynamic Tension in Cat's Cradle evokes Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, although Charles Atlas' muscle-building method is more in keeping with Vonnegut's unpretentious style and sources...
Revenue sharing, that paradigm of creative federalism, sounds big in the aggregate: $2.5 billion in the first installment of Government funds recently sent to communities round the country. But what does that mean, town by town, in terms of the bottom line? Not a whale of a lot, if you are Robert W. Harshaw, mayor of McConnells, S.C. (pop. 200). Harshaw, 69, a dairy farmer, does not remember specifically applying for a federal grant. Still, he received a check for $346. Uncertain as to what to do with such dubious largesse, Harshaw consulted Councilman Sam Crawford, who advised: "Just send...
...summarily scratched, the hunger for acquisition is not so easily appeased. No need to parody the King Ranch; the cynic can start small. A shrewd shopper may buy an entire ten-acre island in Deerskin Lake, Wis., for $115,000. For a bit more, the Bahamas' entire Whale Cay, complete with mansion and matching village can be acquired: 650 acres, 20 minutes by plane from downtown Nassau, seven white-sand beaches, and all priced to sell at $3,500,000. Is the purchaser partial to antiques? He can live in one (when he is not in his Breuer building...
From the deep, cold, green-black waters of Norway's longest fjord, the questions kept coming. What was it that several people had seen mysteriously breaking the surface between the dark, forbidding mountains that line Sogne Fjord? Was it a whale? Was it a wreck? Was it a Soviet submarine dropping radio beacons for possible use in some future war? As Norwegian frigates and planes, aided by British navy helicopters, crisscrossed the 112-mile-long fjord last week in an earnest game of cat and underwater mouse, an Albanian radio report offered the most amazing explanation...
...Francis titled a canvas The Whiteness of the Whale, an open invitation to connect his work to Melville, who wrote of Moby Dick in a celebrated passage: "But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness...why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind." Naturally, to invoke Melville does not make Sam Francis the Melville of painting. Yet his best work sometimes touches...