Word: infernos
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...self-reflexive mode of invention that one associates more with Picasso than anyone earlier. This point is brought home dramatically by the gallery of motifs from The Gates of Hell, from The Thinker itself (originally meant to be the central figure over the doorway, a Dante dreaming the whole Inferno) to the battalion of flying, crouching, writhing figures, bare forked animals all, that crowd the plinths...
...most remarkable feature of Ginzburg's narrative is the decency and kindness she encountered in the Arctic inferno. She describes the kinship that developed among political prisoners as "the strongest of all human relationships " citing innumerable examples of their virtually suicidal generosity to one another. Alongside her portraits of cruel or monstrously indifferent guards and camp administrators are some of men and women capable of acts of compassion. One camp commander, whom she describes as a "peculiar specimen," intervened again and again to save her and her camp lover later her husband, the prisoner-physician Anton Walter...
...noisy inferno at Westinghouse's lamp factory in Bloomfield, N.J., a Unimate 2015G robot performs a process called "swaging." This is somewhat like making spaghetti, but it is done with 21-in. rods of yellow tungsten, destined to become light-bulb filaments. The robot lifts them off a conveyor belt and sticks them into a blazing furnace (3,200° F), then into a swaging machine that stretches the rods until they have grown to 37 in. in length and shrunk to exactly .467 in. in diameter. Three workers, each of whom cost the company $20,000 per year...
...forget O.J. Simpson, running through the flaming conflagration of The Towering Inferno in his first appearance on the big screen, only to hand Fred Astaire Jennifer Jones' cat--and leave Jennifer Jones to roast in the skyscraper. Or the likes of shipmate Roddy McDowall, saving some singing blonde floozy when the cruiser Poseidon rolled over and played dead--only to end up a piece of fondue in the ship's smokestack...
...gods of man's myths were elaborately, even bizarrely, vengeful. In the Inferno, Dante's Deity was satanically inventive in making the vengeance fit the crime. The best tragic theater (Hamlet, for example) and some of the worst has been built around the deep urge to settle someone's hash. In an orgy of horrific finality and emotional overstatement, Medea murders her two sons and hurls their corpses at Jason. That, God knows, ought to teach...