Word: alexandrian
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...time of year when we are allowed to be optimistic, we should remember the poet for more than that lesson. The son of a Greek family from Constantinople, Cavafy was born in 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt. He wrote in both his native Greek and English, but he was an Alexandrian and proud of it. He was, in other words, a symbol himself - of a time when the Middle East was not shaped by thugs like Saddam, but could enfold many religions and languages, and breed from their interplay sublime moments of art and humanity. If the capture of Saddam marks...
...Twombly is a textbook case of High and Low in one parcel: an Alexandrian painter in love with entropy and yet capable of toughness. He can summon a carnivalesque energy, as in Ferragosto IV, 1961. He enjoys the blooming and buzzing of nature, though his responses to it in recent years -- evocations of the rural hill landscapes around his studio in Gaeta -- are formulaic and hark back to Dubuffet and, earlier, to Soutine's Ceret paintings. The phrases he writes on the canvas are place names and snatches of poetry, done in a faint cursive script that is always...
...pastoral mode is a dream of escape. It rises, in literature, with a resentment of big-city life -- in the Alexandrian period, around 250 B.C.; two centuries later, with Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics, it is in full spate; and from then on, Latin literature pullulates with rustic shepherds, flutes, nymphs and country retreats. When the classics were revived by Renaissance scholars (no strangers to urban anxiety themselves), the fantasy of the locus amoenus, the sylvan wilderness as "delightful place," moved to the forefront of the Western imagination. There it still reigns, vastly complicated and mutated by real necessity...
...commonplaces as I SHOP THEREFORE I AM). But no one could accuse it of the air-headedness that marked its immediate predecessor. This is a tighter, more conservative Biennial, attentive to the internal rhymes of current art and to the cross relations between artists. What we have is an Alexandrian fallback -- a sense of the basically academic nature of most "advanced" American art, its recoil from making big parodies of invention, its desire to navigate honorably in a cultural trough whose sides are lined with art fans...
...seems that Delawie blithely envisioned an Alexandrian theatrical conquest without considering the limitations of his stage and cast. After all, even a threadbare musical like My Fair Lady can be mended with judicious shearing of cast and plot and modernizing of a few phrases of antiquated moralism. Delawie had innumerable versions to choose as models for his adaptation; he could even have set it in Cambridge and poked fun at Dorchester accents...