Word: text
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While there is some question whether this and several other of the earliest recorded sightings involved actual exploding stars, there is little doubt about the guest star of A.D. 185. "Second year of the Chung-p'ing reign period," reads an ancient Chinese text, "tenth month, day kuei-hai, a guest star appeared within nanmen. It was as large as half a mat; it was multicolored, and it scintillated. It gradually became smaller and disappeared in the sixth month of the year after next." The description, especially concerning the brightness and slow fade of the star, seems to confirm...
...these very apercus are what mar the text. In adding to Defoe's repertory company, Coetzee has introduced urgencies that are neither fresh nor illumined, only brilliantly disguised. Flashing back and forward, scattering allusions, adopting a series of poses and styles, the author is less reminiscent of a prior novelist than of contemporary street mimes who build hints until the audience shouts in recognition. Readers of this achingly symbolic retelling are likely to give a similar response. But will they applaud the author -- or will they really be congratulating themselves...
...orthodoxy. Said West Germany's Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the congregation, at a Rome press conference: "What is technologically possible is not also morally admissible." The document is being termed "Ratzinger's catechism" because of its substantial use of a question-and-answer format. Clinical in tone, the text bears the title Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation: Replies to Certain Questions...
...blearily in morning classes, peering at a white expanse of notebook, the professor's voice floating invisibly above my bowed head. Immobile hours in front of black strings of print straightjacket my nerves. I walk out of the library dazed, moaning like a dead Boris Karloff, text-book scraps and computer paper fluttering from my mummified shell...
Glowacki's text, translated by Jadwiga Kosicka, benefits from lively staging by Arthur Penn and sensitive performances. Ron Silver bearishly evokes the descent from self-doubt to despair. Dianne Wiest (an Oscar nominee for her role in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters) bubbles with fantasies of redemption: she stuffs a pillow under her clothes and says she will have a child; she tells an enigmatic joke and vows to become a stand-up comic. Each gently deflects the other in a tender marriage, unharrowed by grief...