Word: anterooms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...silver teapot, glides through the crowd; and police murmur discreetly into cellular intercoms. But otherwise it's like being shepherded, en masse, through an empty stage set. Nobody here but us tourists. What you see is what you get. The only domestic trace is a mysterious table in the anteroom to the Ministers' Staircase, on which sit a bottle of Malvern water (unopened) and two glasses (turned upside down). What is the meaning of this Magrittean still life...
Nowhere is it more brilliantly manifested than in his lawcourt drawings: the pompous judges, the robed lawyers whispering their deals and making their pleas, the cavernous Piranesian spaces of the anteroom to the Palace of Justice known as the Salle des Pas-Perdus, or Room of Wasted Steps, the frightened clients, the stone-faced ushers, the bewildered accused in the dock. It took another 19th century genius, Dickens, to convey in fiction what Daumier gives in line and wash: the sense of the law, not as a means toward fairness or justice but as an enormous and self-feeding machine...
Baker's new book, Vox (Random House; $15), should vault him out of the anteroom of cult writers. Vox is not a voyage into the deep time of interior thought but a story that takes place in the time it takes to read it. Vox's 165 pages consist of a single telephone conversation between a man and a woman, strangers who have both called an adult party line and then decided to have a private conversation. We never find out what they do, how old they are or what they look like, but by the end of Baker...
Washington is full of busy, self-important people, some of them actually important, but very few who would routinely keep you waiting 45 minutes in the anteroom for a long-scheduled 15-minute appointment. If the President himself left you twiddling your thumbs outside the Oval Office for three-quarters of an hour, you probably wouldn't mind -- but you probably would get an apology. Yet that kind of wait is common, without apology, when you visit a doctor's office...
...Robert Shenton and University Attorney Michael W. Roberts. It was a thankless task for both men. A scene observed by reporters at the Waldorf seemed to characterize the effort. As Harvard's governing boards dined with Rudenstine inside the hotel's Louis XVI room, Roberts sat alone in the anteroom reading that day's New York Times. Inside the paper was an article reporting that Rudenstine was the search committee's choice, a fact which Roberts and Shenton had worked hard to keep from the press...