Word: conceit
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FOUR men spend a weekend eating themselves to death in a grim, overdecorated mansion: the conceit has the imprint of an allegory by Bunuel, the echo of wild house parties in Italian movies of a decade ago, the teasing metaphysics of a "Last Year at Marienbad." Four men tied to a brotherhood pact that tests endurance --the premise is also a kinky Continental variation on "Deliverance...
...certainly utterly bereft of Greatness, but it is great in the way that Tony the Tiger intones the word. And it is not, as some have intimated, the pretentious and self-indulgent product of a jaded literary titan who has nothing better to do than write the Great American Conceit. Roth has asked for it -- he can probably afford to lay himself open to this kind of facile speculation. But for once let the context be forgot, not only because one could make a case for a peculiarly redemptive humility of tone in the novel, but just on general principles...
...Glynis Johns). She is an actress fabled for her affairs on-and offstage who is currently pleasuring herself with a hussar (Lawrence Guittard). This is our old friend from Roman comedy, the miles gloriosus, the soldier puffed up with vanity, rage (when he encounters Cariou), and the sternly ludicrous conceit that his wife (Patricia Elliot) and his mistress ought to be equal paragons of fidelity. This tangled skein of love and its counterfeits is happily unraveled in Act II at the country house of the actress's mother (Hermione Gingold), an old crone and an amorous relic...
...Lotte Goslar's New York-based Pantomime Circus demonstrates a rare and precious conceit: dance can be funny as well as fashionable. One of the best of American mimes, Goslar is a dumpling of a woman with a turned-up nose and a turned-down figure that often resembles a lightly squeezed tube of toothpaste. Gnome is where her heart is, especially when spoofing flowers, inch-worms and swishy ballet masters, or imitating a katydid rubbing its legs (Splendor in the Grass). When four of her dancers somehow managed to portray a cowardly lion encountering an equally cowardly clown...
...understand Nabokov's peculiar conceit about time: he refuses to believe in the future or in a "flow" from moment to moment. We can sense the present and picture the past, but we can never prove the future. It is "but a figure of speech, a specter of thought." Some things are more likely to happen than others, to be sure, but none are certain. So the world of Transparent Things is revealed entirely in the present, but a present which is transparent to the past. The narrating guide instructs us how to approach this new mode of being: "When...