Word: amalgam
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...Difficulty. In North America, during the 19th century and almost up to the present generation, he wrote, there were basically two kinds of Protestants: liberals and fundamentalists. The liberals viewed the New Testament as an amalgam of history and legend in which their scholars searched for "the historical Jesus" for an answer to the question: What was this great holy man really like, what did he really say and do? The fundamentalists, on the other hand, rejected such "scientific" analysis of the Gospels, clinging to "the letter of Scripture, trusting the Spirit to reveal to them its true meaning...
...Cameron Hawley's latest novel, and for a moment the startled bookshop browser may wonder whether this chronicler of corporate Lancelots has abandoned the executive suite for the ducal fortress. He has done no such thing, of course. The Lords are not border chiefs but a matrimonial amalgam-Lincoln and Maggie Lord, that is. Lincoln is an organization mandible-a tanned, nobly hewn jaw suspended six feet from the floor and usually worth $50,000 a year because it inspires respect and belief when it flaps, strikes fear when it is silent. Pretty, intelligent Maggie, every tailored inch...
Stylistically, the picture can only be described as an amalgam, with bugle-clear echoes of Raphael and Velasquez, muted ones of Turner, the impressionists, and such modern reproduction devices as the color dot screen. The composition is strict, static, deliberate and almost incredibly spacious, yet the lack of technical and emotional unity makes it seem cluttered and diffuse. It is as if a profoundly erudite painter had dozed off at his window in the dawn, and dreamed what no other man could imagine, a pearly vision of the impossible mingling with the possible...
Contradictory Feminine. Berg based his tortured opera on two plays (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora) by erotic, tormented Frank Wedekind (1864-1918). In German Playwright Wedekind's mind-and in Berg's-Lulu is an amalgam of all the contradictory feminine instincts: she is innocent and worldly, timid and rapacious, sentimental and heartless. Before the garishly painted curtain rises on a circus ring, a ringmaster invites the audience to witness the spectacle of the human circus, then calls: "Bring in our snake." In comes an assistant carrying Lulu, dressed in long black stockings...
...like an echo from a Ziegfeld revue. A couple whisked onstage to do a comic turn, punctuated with the oddly archaic slang of the hepcat: "Hey, baby! Let's have a ball!" Occasion : the Manhattan opening of Japan's all-girl Takarazuka Dance Theater, an amalgam of the Folies-Bergere, the Radio City Rockettes, and native Kabuki styles...