Word: conceits
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...early '90s. Yet her actual writing ability has been eclipsed by her personality. Some episodes of her obnoxious self-righteousness include entering a dinner party to insult a journalist who gave her a bad review and her claims that she writes as well as Shakespeare. Other tales of conceit include her self-nomination as "favorite living author," with her choice for the 1992 Book of the Year, her own Written on the Body...
...been said that in America during the fractious 1850s, before the Civil War, Walt Whitman entertained the wistful, urgent conceit that his great poem "Leaves of Grass" might save the Union. It would show Americans that despite their divisions they were one great nation. Montaigne, almost three centuries earlier, worked a variation on the theme. Rising above dogma and abstraction, he would pursue the general human truth by studying himself - and such generalized self-knowledge, the recognition of their human selves, might relieve people of their inclination to kill one another for religious reasons...
Marcus shows how the image of twenty-one-year-old musical Antichrist shows up again and again in discussions of the chief executive. He knows how plain the comparison is, and like any competent critic he stretches the conceit bravely, well past the facts' tolerance. Clinton's politics go almost unmentioned, for example, the better to focus on the president as if he were nothing more than an incarnation of a cultural icon. The Elvis perspective is, however, a stunningly illuminating way to see Clinton and understand why we have hated and loved...
Rich spreads the nostalgia and the theater-as-life metaphors too thick at times, and like many authors of his generation, he is enthralled with the conceit that the politics and culture of his time just happened to complicate themselves in synch with his life: his loss of innocence is paired with the quiz-show scandals, his home terrors with the Cuban missile crisis, his maturing and breaking away from home with Martin Luther King's assassination...
...George W. Bush likes nothing better than to hang around with members of minority groups, that Al Gore likes nothing better than to hang around with Tipper, and that everybody in the Reform Party is crazy" - and takes your questions (really hers). Very original use of "Survivor" as comic conceit...