Word: details
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Avoiding the issue is no longer an option--its consequences are too great and its impact too personal. The chances of the scandal leaving our thoughts are no greater than the chances of it clearing off the front page. Yet, facing it becomes unbearable given the level of detail we now know. Even the jokes don't seem funny anymore...
...Sometime between now and the end of this month, the report of independent counsel Kenneth Starr is expected to be sent to Congress, where it will promptly explode. Washington is bracing itself for a text unlike anything it has ever handled, with interludes that describe, in all too fascinating detail, half a dozen or more anatomical engagements between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Depending on how vivid it is, Starr's report could be the closest thing to pornography ever issued by the Government Printing Office...
...Some women get replaced and grieve at Neiman Marcus; others--inhabitants of Manhattan's literary demimonde--write books intended to embarrass their exes for eternity. In her memoir Breakup, Catherine Texier laments getting dumped in tortured detail. (Does his new lover know about his toenail fungus? she wonders.) Anita Liberty's How to Heal the Hurt by Hating sticks to skewering her former beau, and, happily, all the comedy is intentional...
Flatly written, with detail piling upon detail like so much slag on a heap, Maynard's memoir returns repeatedly to the idea of emotional and literary honesty. "Some day, Joyce, there will be a story you want to tell for no better reason than because it matters to you more than any other," Salinger tells her. "You'll simply write what's real and true." Maybe this is it. But where Salinger, or many a better writer, would have fictionalized his truths, opening up new universes for the reader, Maynard sheds no light on anything beyond the little spotlight...
...many," he reminded himself in one of the numerous notebooks he kept, and the manifesto of this belief (not, alas, in this show) is The Painter's Triumph, 1838. It depicts Mount himself in a mood of exaltation, flourishing his palette and brushes and pointing out a detail of a painting to his ideal viewer--not a New York "conosher" but a farmer in a straw hat who still holds the buggy whip with which he has, presumably, driven in from Long Island. On the wall behind, a drawing of the head of Apollo is looking haughtily away from this...