Word: fame
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...novel Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow described the onset of fame: "I experienced the high voltage of publicity. It was like picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk. It was like the rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation." Some who grasp those charged serpents will themselves incandesce in celebrity for a little while and then wink out (goodbye, Clifford Irving; goodbye, Nina van Pallandt): defunct flashlights, dead fireflies. Thus they will have obeyed Warhol's Law, first propounded by Andy Warhol, the monsignor of transience and junk culture: "In the future, everybody...
Contrary to Warhol's essentially democratic premise-everybody, but briefly -fame elevates some mortals into realms where their celebrity achieves a life of its own. While a Tiny Tim or a Judith Exner may flare and fade, others acquire a strange permanence-or its illusion, which is of course just as good. They have been transported into another medium where information and images are permanently (or for years, anyway) stored. In the formula of Historian Daniel Boorstin, they have "become well known for being well known." A classic of the category is, say, Elizabeth Taylor. Who, outside...
...Anselmo. Dishonesty continues to lure Brady: he builds an insurance empire through which his new friend Gennaro sluices his racketeer's profits. Carroll's message is an old one: with such mortally dangerous friends, one needs no enemies. Time and again, the man who won his first fame by setting up an ambush is himself waylaid by his friends...
...main difficulties with Maude Pratt is that she is more convincing as a metaphor than as a character. She is full of biting, often cranky opinions about fame and the effects of patronage on artists. This contrasts with her humid, romantic maunderings on art and incest. It is almost as if Author Theroux were suggesting that Maude's lust for her brother was indistinguishable from her aloof and aristocratic aesthetic...
There seems to be no limit to the potential of this slight young Kentuckian who so loves to ride. "Gettin' the best you can from a horse, that's the whole thing," he says. "That's the real pleasure." He has been, so far, charmingly oblivious to the fame he has earned so quickly and the pressure that has come with it. "Reason I don't feel any pressure is because I don't want to," he says simply. "You have to perform, have to do your...