Word: gravid
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Alexander is in the midst of a love affair with his thesaurus that is torrid enough to rival John Banville or Salman Rushdie. “Gravid,” “photopic,” “calcareous,” “neurasthenia”: there is no shortage of ten-dollar words in this book, which can read at times like a combination of medical dictionary and arcane nautical treatise. Alexander provides a glossary at the end, but this covers only the most obscure and technical areas of his vocabulary. As overbearing and unnecessary...
...loves series and variation. The biggest single work at Marlborough is Embryology, 1978-81 -- a whole landscape of some 600 stuffed burlap "rocks," ranging from mere pebbles to big boulders, an extraordinary array that suggests cocoons and gravid wombs as well as stones. Her chief metaphor, as Brenson (who wrote the catalogs for both shows) points out, is "the enchanted forest," which "can be traced back to animistic peoples for whom trees and forests were fearfully and delightfully alive." The tree trunk refers to, and sometimes becomes, the human torso. The "mutilated Eden" of Poland's forest turns into...
Dukakis trudges. He is a compact and gravid man, like a wrestler, with feet apart and stance wary, as if afraid of being knocked down. He is a man careful beyond the ordinary standards of prudence. He holds the railing tightly as he descends the stairs from an airplane...
Thirty years ago, a U.S. Senator rose in the chamber to denounce the "illicit affair" between a "popular but pregnant Hollywood movie queen" and a "love pirate." The pirate was the brilliant Italian director Roberto Rossellini (Open City, Paisan). The gravid queen was, of course, Ingrid Bergman, who had arrived in Hollywood from Sweden in 1939, a hefty 5 ft. 8 in. of raw material crying out for diet, plucked eyebrows and capped teeth...
...moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars." The design, compressed into a few square inches, has a marvelous sweep-the rockfolds echoing the curve of the dragon's tail and repeated in the pink folds of cloth on the woman's gravid belly...