Word: erewhon
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...condensed at will. But the struggle for visibility is intense from Maine to Albuquerque, and careerism, once a guilty secret, has become one of the art world's main texts. We have at last reached the state of mind envisioned by Samuel Butler more than 100 years ago in Erewhon, where students are examined in the prices fetched by leading pictures of the previous 50 or 100 years, because the artist "is a dealer in pictures, and it is as important for him to learn how to adapt his wares to the market...
Like Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Thomas Berger's principality of Saint Sebastian can be found on no map, but its significance will be clear to any reader with a sufficiently jaundiced eye. Tucked away in Middle Europe, somewhere between Johann Strauss's Vienna and Kafka's Prague, the country subsists on a precarious economy of universal credit. Politics and journalism are against the law; pederasty is condoned, but rudeness is considered a crime against the state. The government bureaucracy includes the absurdly named Ministry of Clams, a sort of dead-letter office for all insoluble problems, whose minister believes that...
...that crushed a man to death in Japan last year did little to silence the talk that machines are a threat to human preeminence. That talk has been alive ever since people first discovered that they could manufacture tools vastly superior to themselves; in Samuel Butler's satire Erewhon (1872), the citizens establish a museum of old machines in which they at once deposit and abandon their mechanical inventions, which they believed would swallow up their souls. When machines possess artificial intelligence, like computers, the human fear of being overtaken seems both more urgent and more complex. Science-fiction...
...longest story, "The Dawn in Erewhon," the hero, a Dutch philosopher, Adriaan van Hovendaal, who apparently actually exists, says, "Man has a history rather than a nature." And this story is Davenport's most comprehensive attempt to present that idea. But here the author fails, partially because he gets too pedantic, in both his language and his ideas, and partially because he shifts from the present action to an excerpted translation of van Hovendaal's works on Samuel Butler's utopic Erewhon and his own concepts of Utopia which are rightly described as "some of the strangest in modern thought...
Some eat such foods for religious reasons, believing that certain items nourish the soul as well as the body. "Eating is a spiritual movement," says one of Erewhon's customers. "It upsets me to see people eating junk. It's just an escape, like drugs or alcohol." Followers of the late George Ohsawa, a Japanese-born philosopher, subscribe to a macrobiotic diet that relies on tea, brown rice, beans and nuts. That program may slight fats. A New Jersey girl who followed it too strictly died of malnutrition, and parents who limit their infants to the guru...