Word: balzacs
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...Balzac had a "vague dread" of being photographed. Like some primitive peoples, he thought the camera steals something of the soul -- that, as he told a friend "every body in its natural state is made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films." Each time a photograph was made, he believed, another thin layer of the subject's being would be stripped off to become not life as before but a membrane of memory in a sort of translucent antiworld...
According to Balzac, "Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation." According to P.J. O'Rourke, "Manners are a way to screw people over without their knowing it." Although 150 years separate the master novelist from the Rolling Stone nihilist, their contempt for social artifice is identical. The difference, of course, is that one of them has a savage comic flair. The other one wrote in French...
...fact, can be found in the general stacks--books like D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and even the Kinsey report. The works of the self-styled Marquis de Sade, Honore de Balzac and William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch also take up space on the three rows of shelves that make up the "XR" collection...
...Critics compare you with Dickens, Balzac, Zola. Pretty good company...
...defiantly individualist novelist-journalist-social commentator, whose dissection of our contemporary culture has won comparisons with Dickens and Balzac, looks ahead to the '90s. Instead of the rampant greed of the waning decade, he foresees a slowing of the sexual revolution, a reviving interest in religion and a retreat from the vanities he has been chronicling so deftly...