Word: medusa
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...explains his notion of textual lightness, for example, with the story of how Perseus slew the Medusa. In Calvino's allegory, the Medusa, whose gaze turns men to stone, freezes language with paralyzing weight. Perseus destroys the Medusa with lightness: he flies above her, and he only looks at her indirectly, in the mirror of his shield. Indirection and change are as important to Calvino's lightness as the subtraction of weight...
...Naughty -- Witty, athletic, adventurous Manhattan book editor, 36, with Medusa tresses and a Circe smile. A whiz in the bedroom and the kitchen. Loves children, roller coasters, opera (esp. Madame Butterfly), gourmet food and cutlery. Hates rabbits, saying goodbye and meeting guys through a personals column like this one. But God put too many married men on this island, so let's have some fun. Just be smart, sexy, fearless and potentially unattached. Photo and resume will get a response from the woman of your dark dreams. Give me a chance and I'll love you to pieces. c/o ALEX...
...course, Jones has always had a sizable appetite for fashion overstatement, so she did not shrink from slipping her 5-ft. 9-in. frame into a 30-ft. by 60- ft. dress. And she tops off the reckless excess with phantasmagoric headgear that looks like a co-creation by Medusa and Dr. Seuss. Proclaims Jones: "The audience sees me as a larger-than-life image they can worship -- like a hero." So there. And Liberace, babe, eat your heart...
...cheerfully admits to rearranging details and changing names (an American writer becomes Alexander Lobrau, a construction company is called Piranesi Brothers). And no character sketch is more heightened in its absurdity than his portrait of his younger self, about whom everything apparently was hopeless: his head for alcohol, his "Medusa touch" in everyday affairs, even his clothes. One of the best running jokes concerns a Singapore-made suit whose shoulders engulfed his head whenever he gestured with his arms, causing mystifying blackouts...
...just a month shy of 25. He was not far from such ambitious images of modern catastrophe as The Sinking of the Titanic, 1912. This enormous, early painting, 8 ft. 8 1/2 in. by 10 ft. 10 in., is a "journalistic" homage to Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, but the scores of figures dumbly raging for survival in the cold green water have nothing classical about them. Already one sees some of the main traits of mature Beckmann breaking through: especially the sense of packed humanity in tight spaces that somehow betoken worse things beyond their walls; the tilted...