Word: randomness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...DUCHAMP, by Robert Lebel (191 pp.; Grove; $15), is billed as the "first full-scale study" of the Daddy of Dadaists. The scrappy text suggests that the author followed a method once used by Duchamp for writing music-he drew notes and musical markings out of a bag at random. But the volume makes up for the grab-bag text by reproducing almost every known work of Expressionist Cubist-Surrealist Duchamp, from his mustachioed Mona Lisa and famed Nude Descending a Staircase to the catalogue cover he decorated with a foam-rubber breast and the caption: "Please touch...
...knew-Tennessee Waltz. After about the sixth chorus, his voice had splintered to a teeth-chattering accompaniment, and Buie began to lose hope. He dozed a while. Then, two hours after he went overboard, he saw lights. It was the escort vessel Leslie L. B. Knox, sailing a random course between exercises. Buie yelled. A sharp-eared sailor on watch heard him, sounded the emergency rescue alarm. Searchlights blazed. Knox's helm swung hard over to circle, and Rescue Swimmer Harold Martin, 19, dived over the side, swam 30 yds. to Buie and hauled him aboard...
...atom thick. When the sheets are stacked up in a crystal, the distance between the atoms in adjoining layers is more than twice as great (3.35 angstroms*) as the distance between the atoms in the individual sheets (1.42 angstroms). In ordinary commercial graphite, microscopic crystals are jumbled almost at random, but in Pyrographite they are mostly aligned with their sheets parallel (see diagram). This builds up a layered structure that resists the motion of heat across the layers but permits easy passage along them...
...exist cheek by jowl with two of Yale's most determinedly pseudo-Gothic structures: the ten-story Payne Whitney Gymnasium and the Yale Graduate School. Talking with students, Saarinen discovered that undergraduates want their rooms to be as individual as possible, decided that the rooms should be "as random as those in an old inn rather than as standardized as those in a modern motel." In addition, Saarinen was determined to discover an architecture that would keep the two new colleges from looking like stripped-down cousins of the older structures built in the days of low construction costs...
...meaning of the old story, as Director Camus sees it, is that love and death and rebirth, with all their decisive importance for the individual, are mere incidents in the larger process of life. Camus' image of life is the tropical carnival-random, unprincipled, delirious. And the spirit of the carnival, the pulse of life, is expressed in the drums. Before the story begins, the drums begin their swift, intoxicating beat, and after it is done, the drums are beating still. Every song of love is sung against the dull indifference of drums; every victory of death is lost...