Word: cante
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This poet is a hard taskmaster. He wants his readers to clear their senses of the cant and iconography that fog perceptions. His highest value is individualism as evolved by Western civilization. He skips through history to find something rotten in Byzantium, the "delirium and horror of the East." There is also the calamity of modernist architecture: "Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the color of an upturned grave." The flip side of this disgust is nostalgia. Though Brodsky overwhelms with startling insight and provocations, he is most affecting in "In a Room and a Half," an account...
...Cant't find that rare Zen poem or Lenin's "Materialism and Empiro-Criticism?" Stay right in Harvard Square because specialty book stores are one of its specialties...
Marden's work reminds one how silly was the death-of-abstract-art talk heard so much at the start of the '80s, as foolish as the death-of-painting cant in the '70s. Much of the work of younger American artists remains abstract, whether "decorative" (Alan Shields, Valerie Jaudon or the exuberant Judy Pfaff, whose manic, space-consuming constructions are hybrids of painting and sculpture) or more ostensibly rigorous in its aims, like that of Gary Stephan, 42. His paintings are like massive and vivid reflections on late cubism, especially the utopian "cubifying" abstraction of the 1920s, as practiced...
This attack is somewhat ironic coming from Epstein, a professor at Northwestern University and editor of The American Scholar (the voice of Phi Beta Kappa), but Epstein's prose is refreshingly free of academic cant. In fact, he attempts to puncture the diseased, pseudo-critical language he calls "blurbissimo"--swollen with hyperbolic vacuity and written more or advertisements than reviews...
...Selections have been judiciously culled from his ninevolume magnum opus. Furnished with explanatory notes, the correspondence may be read as an unselfconscious autobiography recounted in the voice Henry James found as "soft and rich as that of a counselling angel." Eliot also delights in playing the devil with Victorian cant and hypocrisy...