Word: balzacs
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...WIRE SEASON 3 DAVID SIMON IS the Balzac of Baltimore. Each season the writer-creator's sprawling HBO crime drama takes on a different social issue in the inner city--this time asking whether it's possible to break the cycle of drugs and violence. A police major (Robert Wisdom) creates a system of unofficial "free zones"--blocks where drug dealing is tacitly legalized. Meanwhile a drug kingpin (Idris Elba) tries to persuade his crew to run its drug trade like a business, with less bloodshed and more profit. The surprising--and politically and personally explosive--results on both sides...
...born-again Jungian," says Davies of the analyst whose influence is discernible throughout his fiction. "But I find that Jung provides rich feeding for a novelist, with his layers and depth of meaning." Davies' increased leisure has given him more time to read and reread his favorites: Trollope, Dickens, Balzac and Stendhal. "If you pay attention to great literature," he says, "you don't have to have a psychiatrist...
...dreaming hand. In 1880 he could give Dr. Henry Shiff's bronze beard a labile, gratuitous beauty of texture akin to Monet; while, seen close up, the stubbled, worn face of Sherman is not a military mask but a psychological study as deep, in its way, as Rodin's Balzac. There are weak things in this show, and not a few florid ones; and by its nature, it cannot give Saint-Gaudens' monuments the coverage they need. But no matter: the illusions it dispels make up for the works it omits--and fresh converts to Saint-Gaudens can seek those...
...Music Critic Andrew Porter of The New Yorker, is a rich blend of Renaissance music, jazz and electronics that is surrounded by an uncompromisingly modernist microtonal framework. Another happily eclectic work, Hans Werner Henze's The English Cat, takes an anthropomorphic tale by English Playwright Edward Bond, based on Balzac, and sets it to music that freely ranges from kitschy consonance to acerbic dissonance. Both operas have the kind of unquestioned stylistic integrity that bespeaks major works...
Writers who turn themselves into celebrities run such risks. Balzac is said to have formed a theory about the dangers of being photographed, which may have something to do with the hazards of celebrity in general. Everybody is composed of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, the theory said. Since man is not able to create something out of nothing, each photograph must lay hold of, detach and use up one of the layers of the body on which it was focused. The self is peeled away like an onion...