Word: may
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Farming, which took shape in the Old World around 8,000 B.C. and in the New World a few millenniums later, is a much misunderstood meme. Anthropologists sometimes call it an "energy technology," since food does, after all, energize us; but farming may have originally mattered more as a kind of information-processing technology. By radically increasing the human population that a given acre could support, farming sped up the synergistic exchange of cultural information, lubricating innovation; it packed lots of neurons together, raising both the size and the efficiency of social brains...
...starters, if you equate nature with beauty--as Emerson and other transcendentalists tended to--then there is a kind of beauty in the unfolding of technology. It is a process of natural evolution, and may deserve the tribute that Darwin paid to organic evolution: "There is grandeur in this view of life...
...this century and encompasses as well major annunciatory works by the authors of what we deem our greatest musical composition and sculpture, and not a few runners-up in several categories. To put it simply: there was in these few years an outburst of creative (and subversive) daring that may well be unsurpassed in human history...
...Characters in Search of an Author is performed in Rome. Pirandello challenges the conventional distinction between illusion and reality as well as authorial omniscience--the whole business of tyrannically driving "his" creations along to some preordained point. This prefigures what may be postmodernism's most interesting idea: it is the reader, not the writer, who is the final arbiter of a work's meaning. Which, naturally, renders meaning itself indeterminate...
...analogies to Joyce's work. Both are inferentially portraits of a pullulating urban landscape; both wear their classical erudition boldly. Which is to say, both writers embrace modernism's most basic hallmark--self- and cultural awareness--and know exactly what traditions they are undermining. The difference between them may be largely a matter of fastidiousness. Ulysses is finally an affirmation: "I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes." Eliot's nervous...