Word: rites
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...feeling; it has some of Animal's raunchiness, but none of its loony anarchy. The title refers to a '50s bawdy house where six Florida youths search for sexual initiation, find humiliation, and then, by revenging themselves on its proprietor, achieve a sort of do-it-yourself rite de passage. The rest of the time they spend spying on the girls' locker room and recalling the sex jokes of yesteryear. Bob Clark (Murder by Decree) is the writer-director here. If he knew how to stage comedy, or find a scene's point, Porky...
Japanese students have a name for that annual examination rite: shiken jigoku-"examination hell." Each year some 700,000 students (32% of Japanese high school graduates) go on to college, but a candidate may apply to only one top university. Because government ministries and top firms all recruit from a handful of universities, having to settle for a low-ranking institution is an almost irreversible disaster. The thousands of students who do not get accepted at the one university of their choice spend a year, sometimes even two, in cram schools preparing to try again. These crammers are called ronin...
Like his hero, Cheever wants to believe that life is not being systematically brutalized and defaced, that there is nothing new under the sun that cannot be traced to some ancient, honorable rite. It would, unfortunately, take a much longer book than this to make such a case, much less transcribe it into a persuasive narrative. Readers new to Cheever are likely to find Oh What a Paradise It Seems fragmentary, preachy and thin. But the book is illuminated by its past; it assumes significance from the history of splendid fiction that Cheever has given it and everyone. -By Paul...
Harvard did what it was expected to do, finishing solidly in third place (679.5), behind Princeton (1238.5) and Brown (996), and ahead of Yale (458). But for all four teams, the meet was really a rite of passage; a step from the comparative obscurity of the Ivy League to the forefront of Eastern collegiate swimming...
...Watson has a chore now, that of leading his team out of what has become an annual rite of passage--the stretch of games during reading period--and into its first over-.500 season in five years...