Word: dionysians
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...their literary reputations as much as Venice does. The shimmering mirage that illuminated Thomas Mann's seminal novella Death in Venice is the same today as it was when he wrote it in 1912. So too, it seems, are the characters consumed by the city's seething Dionysian urges. Nearly a century later, British author Geoff Dyer, in his latest pair of novellas, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, has returned to Venice an updated version of Mann's aging dilettante. Jeff Atman is an art critic sent from London to cover the 2003 Venice Biennale. His four-day stay...
...small town's Dionysian "Dirty Day" festival: "Those bulging sacks on the cart contain moist soil and live ants, the big, juicy, biting kind, bred and nurtured especially for tonight's extravaganza. Apparently, the ants are sprinkled with vinegar just before the main event, to get them really angry. An army of ant scatterers emerges from behind us, each one with a bag of the anty soil, which they launch into the air above our heads. Screams go up as the sky fills with soil and very annoyed ants...Everyone is maniacally scraping mud and insects from their hair...
...catalogues his quest to eat the whole hog in a yearlong journey through Galicia—a rain-battered, idiosyncratic area in Northern Spain. His challenge is to “eat every part of the pig, in as many places as possible,” but with a Dionysian disregard for order, Barlow leaves the rules of the game frustratingly vague. How will he know if he eats every part? How much of each part does he have to eat? Do eyeballs count? His headfirst dives into platefuls of snouts, curly tails, and the rare strip of tasty bacon...
...think of as the one reserved for wiping your rear. That made it the perfect hand to bring painting back to another kind of fundamental place. The classical world that Twombly invokes in his art isn't the white marble realm of Apollo. It's the sweaty Dionysian scrimmage. Any of his early canvases ? can be a landing field of airborne phalluses, breasts and buttocks, of things squirting, and of brown excremental splats. In The Italians, a 1961 painting begun after he moved his studio to a teeming quarter of Rome worked by prostitutes, darting lines like fever charts...
...rusty Bostonians would be getting lucky for possibly the first time since the Sox last won the Series (a paltry wait, in comparison to the 86-year drought that had preceded it). Drunken college students, and other young revelers, would gush into Copley and Kenmore squares, lubricated into a Dionysian frenzy by a victory in which they played no part, but for which they felt invincibly enjoined to turn over cars and set a lot of things on fire. Of course, the Boston police would already be waiting for them, foaming at the mouth, massaging their batons, and fantasizing about...