Word: almost
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Diaghilev's private life was as notorious as his public spectacles. He was a celebrated figure in the Paris underworld; Nijinsky was one of his lovers. "It is almost impossible," said Stravinsky, "to describe the perversity of Diaghilev's entourage-a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard." He reminded one musician of a "decadent Roman emperor-possibly Genghis Khan or even a barbarous Scythian-and lastly, what he really was: a Russian grand seigneur...
...neck. He cut away the velvet, till it barely covered the buttocks. Nemtchinova had never shown so much leg before (what ballerina had?) and she protested. 'I feel naked!' 'Then go and buy yourself some white gloves!' said Diaghilev. The celebrated white gloves became almost a part of the choreography...
...less happily, is the simple moral that runs through almost all of his work. As Starbuck puts it, "We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one." Yet Vonnegut does not believe that people are capable of doing so, at least not in a way that will make them happy. This leads to the static quality of his books: nothing much ever changes except to get a little worse. Some of the evidence Vonnegut offers is rigged: Starbuck comes to believe that wisdom does not exist and hence can not be used to improve...
...partly the spectacle of Western decadence that aroused the Ayatullah Khomeini to orgies of Koranic proscription. Alcohol, music, dancing, mixed bathing all have been curtailed by the Iranian revolution. Americans find this zealotry sinister, but also quaint: How can almost childish pleasures (a tune on the radio, a day at the beach) deserve such puritanical hellfires? But Americans are also capable of a small chill of apprehension, a barely acknowledged thought about the prices that civilizations pay for their bad habits: If Iran has driven out its (presumably polluted) monarch and given itself over to a purification that demands even...
...sometimes elaborate denial. The critic Richard Oilman recently published Decadence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). His elegant treatise argues that the term is almost impossible to define, is constantly misinterpreted and misused, and quite possibly should be deleted from the language...