Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Your Essay on "The Scariest Time of the Year" [Nov. 3] was funny, except for the stab at the Who. I even thought of my own personal voice of terror: "Ladies and gentlemen: the Moral Majority...
...extraordinarily allusive imagination: forever unpicking its objects, forever recombining them. As the poet-critic Carter Ratcliff remarks at the opening of his brilliant catalogue essay on Cornell as a puritan, he was "a virtuoso of fragments, a maestro of absences. Each of his objects ... is the emblem of a presence too elusive or too vast to be enclosed in a box." The extreme examples of this were, perhaps, Cornell's cosmogonies-the "Soap Bubble Sets," made in the '40s and early '50s. The metaphor on which they rely is simple, even banal: a likeness between soap bubbles...
There was nothing silly or pulpy about Cornell's pursuit of innocence. As Ratcliff argues in his catalogue essay, it had much more to do with the need for redemption than with any fancies about the artist-as-Alice-in-Wonderland. That need could never, by its nature, be satisfied: no guilt, no culture. Cornell was a wholly urban artist, cultivated to his fingertips, and the peace he sought was not pastoral. It was a sense of cultural tranquillity, where all images are equally artificial and equally lucid, permeable to the slightest breath of poetic association, linking memory...
...what a subject for an essay: Alexander the brave, the learned, the musical; Alexander the driven, the murderous, perhaps the mad. Alexander the god. Alexander the drunk. His head dominates the exhibition. In one room there is a congress of his heads, white heads on pillars as if on spears, all facing each other in objective admiration. The ones in the center of the room are spotlit from the ceiling; their shadows make stars on the carpet. It is said that Alexander's real head slept with a dagger and a copy of the Iliad under the pillow...
...Japanese chef insists: "Let little seem like much, as long as it is fresh and beautiful." Tsuji, a former journalist with a degree in French literature who trained with some of Europe's greatest chefs, has written more than a cookbook: his 517-page tome is both an essay on the culinary philosophy of his country and an explanation of the cultural background of its foods. Along the way, he shows in words and excellent artwork the basic repertory, from sushi to a gala banquet consisting of as many as 30 small portions...