Word: balzac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Next year, I and all of my classmates will graduate from Harvard. As a concentrator in French and Italian literature, I will know more than most about Moliere, Honore de Balzac and Emile Zola, and much about their Italian counterparts. In my case, however, I will have picked up only snippets of information from a diverse but disordered array of other disciplines--the English Revolution, early Christian literature in America, basic economics...
...then there are the enormously silly, explicitly sexual sculptural romps by Jake and Dinos Chapman, whose fascination with genetic mutation leads them down the very foolish path of constructing girlish mannequins with phalluses for noses and sexual orifices in all the wrong places. Hardly Rodin. But then Rodin's Balzac, created just before the turn of the century, wrapped the great French novelist in a cape beneath which, it was said, he was holding his own member in the potent coupling of climax and creative genius. The work outraged its patrons and wasn't cast in bronze until after Rodin...
...breed myths and demonizations. The Rothschilds were called, with admiration and loathing, "the Kings of the Jews and the Jews of the Kings"--sometime pariahs and masters of the universe. The bright version of the Rothschilds--benefactors of progress, multilingual cosmopolitans, patrons of the arts, sponsors of Rossini and Balzac, vintners of Mouton and Lafite--was shadowed by a vicious anti-Semitic twin, the view that culminated in Hitler's speeches about "the rapacity of a Rothschild." The family became an all-purpose and surreal villain. Karl Marx vilified the Rothschilds as a quintessence of capitalist evil. One contemporary conspiracy...
...story, adapted from a short novel by the Honore de Balzac, follows a soldier named Augustin Robert (Ben Daniels) who is sent to Egypt in 1798 as the guide and protector of Jean-Michel (Michel Piccoli) an important artist/historiographer. Jean-Michel is on an official mission to draw, measure and document the cultural landmarks of the Egyptian dunes. Of course, the military party with whom he travels are little concerned with monuments or cave-drawings. They have been yanked from their homes and families to conduct a miserable campaign against the Mameluke Dynasty, marching around the desert with their camels...
...Balzac wrote A Passion in the Desert in an era where Rousseau and other philosophers spent gallons of ink wrestling with the essence of man, the core identity that, depending on one's persuasion, either differentiated him from or linked him ineluctably with the animal kingdom. Augustin, well-played for most of the picture by the leonine Daniels, seems intrigued by these same questions, even overwhelmed by them. Having eventually lost hope of any rediscovery, he gives himself over entirely to the cat's way of life: lapping water, shedding his clothes etc. Dementia and self-abandonment are, however, notorious...