Word: edenic
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Journalists tend to think of the world of The Front Page as a kind of Garden of Eden, an unspoiled idyll of frantic competition and luxuriant dissipation in an era when reporters worried about the price of a shot and a beer, not the tax consequences of a vacation home and an individual retirement account. In the mind's eye, the rowdy tabloid reportage of Chicago in the Roaring Twenties seems vivid, creative and a whole lot more fun than today's sober pursuit of facts and reasoned analysis. But 58 years of interpretation, including three film versions, may have...
...mislead them. Doubtless he saw Allie as a bracing variant on his favorite sort of central figure. Perhaps Weir saw in this sacred monster the makings of dark comedy; Allie is a compendium of the cliches of liberaloid social criticism, rich in potential self-parody. For besides creating an Eden for his family, Allie has another, grander dream: the construction of a huge ice-making facility he has designed. Surely there is something funny about a man building an ice palace to serve a few hundred natives who have happily survived for centuries without...
...reality of myriad gridlocked campers frying in the sun at the tepid edge of a half-dead sea -- was created by these painters and their followers. Their relations with this place, or more properly their invention of it, gave modernism its one practical utopia of the senses, a bourgeois Eden whose roots wound back through a coastal peasant culture (still unhurt by tourism in the 1920s) to the Greco-Roman past. Instead of the pie in the sky offered by constructivism, they contemplated the langoustes on the table, bringing their sensuous embodiment to an extraordinary pitch of imaginative precision...
...when the gothic novel described the exotic terrors of old feudal keeps. In the gaslight era, the supernatural took hold of the public imagination, and British authors quickly dominated the field. Their very names suggest creaking Victorian stairways, forbidden rooms and disembodied spirits: Montague Rhodes James, J.S. Le Fanu, Eden Phillpotts, Algernon Blackwood. In the U.S., an alcoholic and sickly journalist led readers down dark corridors that still echo in American and European fiction. Edgar Allan Poe was, wrote D.H. Lawrence, "an adventurer into the vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul." He told of disintegrating...
...like the Great English Artist people were always making him out to be, but he was utterly without pretension, and his zeal for public service, as long as it did not get in the way of his work, was genuine. He was consulted by British Prime Ministers, from Anthony Eden to Margaret Thatcher, on museum and art-education policy and never failed to stand up to them on behalf of younger or less successful artists...