Word: byronism
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...crazy, the rest of us like to think. And great artists are emotional idiots savants, charting the terra incognita of human experience by going over the edge. It is a lovely delusion. It excuses so many excesses and failures, gives rise to so many cautionary legends. George Gordon, Lord Byron incarnated one such fable: the poet as demon lover. He was dead at 36. Joe Orton, the English playwright who died in 1967, lived out another. He cruised danger as if it were a cute trick in a public gents', and was murdered at 34 -- for love! Nice work, guys...
...Orton's craft. But Ken Russell has always been caged inside the beautiful mad creatures he imagines artists to be. No distance, no irony, no coherence, no prisoners. And no surprise that Russell now turns to Gothic, Stephen Volk's script about the famous night in 1816 that Byron (Gabriel Byrne) spent with his mistress Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), his lover John William Polidori (Timothy Spall), his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands) and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson). From that spectral evening emerged Mary's idea for her novel Frankenstein...
Frankenstein was a modern horror story; Russell means Gothic to be the last horror show. Byron is Count Dracula, feeding on his guests' dreams and demons. Shelley is every weak hero, Polidori every mad doctor, Clairmont every wench whose lust turns her into a succubus. And Godwin, racked by visions of her stillborn child, becomes the cursed mothers of The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. From the labor of her nightmares, she gives birth to literature's most enduring monster...
...brother is a former Sandinista who was imprisoned and tortured by his onetime comrades before he escaped to the U.S. Justice Stevens upheld a lower-court ruling that the INS must reconsider her case using the more lenient standard. In a dissent joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Byron White, Lewis Powell maintained it was reasonable for the INS to find no practical distinction between a "clear probability" and "well-founded fear...
Gearan said aides were trying to schedule a meeting between Dukakis and a group of congressmen headed by Rep. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), to discuss possible federal legislation on beefed up tax enforcement based on the commonwealth's tightened tax collecting policies under Dukakis...