Word: melvillean
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...gathered around to watch the broadcast, a family patriarch abruptly changes the channel, putting a strange, new image on the screen. To Ipek’s question of what her father is watching, the father tersely replies, “It’s snow.”Melvillean in its championing of indeterminate imagery, “Snow” makes gazing at television static the act of resistance to fixed symbolism for the 21st century.The tragedy that ensues in the National Theater when Sunay’s company stages a dated play titled “My Fatherland...
...Seas in the 1850s, bound for the gold fields of California, when she comes upon Bethlehem Bay, so renamed by missionaries who have ventured to the Society Islands to "civilize" the natives. When the shipmen and the emissaries of religion meet on the island,they naturally discuss (in perfect Melvillean cadences) the survival of the fittest and the plans of God. Yet all their talk of progress and a New Jerusalem has a slightly piquant air because we know what the future holds in store for them. An earlier section in Cloud Atlas (Random House; 509 pages) has told...
Philbrick avoids moralizing, but his story has a Melvillean coda. Nantucket's pious Quakers never discussed their kinfolks' cannibalism publicly. Pollard wrecked his second ship and wound up a night watchman. With increasing competition and the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, Nantucket's whaling industry went into a tailspin, and the heirs to old families like the Macys, Coffins and Folgers went off-island to seek their fortunes. Score one for the whales...
...galvanic dance of fake-shadowed solids in the Cones and Pillars series of the '80s, from the decorative pastelly flatness of the late-'60s Protractors to the wave of polished aluminum, gray as sea fog, that swells across the wall of MOMA in a magnificent piece with the Melvillean title of Loomings, 1986, Stella wrings more pictorial feeling from abstract art than anyone else alive. His big paintings, when they come off, are almost unique in their confidence: they project a sense of grandeur rather than the usual American inflation of scale. They are also marked by their will...
...health and spirits were at a low ebb, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade is a series of vignettes illustrating the venality of human nature. Woven throughout is the ever changing persona of the Confidence Man, who assumes various guises on board a ship of fools called, with typical Melvillean irony, the Fidèle, as it journeys down the Mississippi one April Fools' Day. It is a rich, difficult and underrated work, but not one well disposed to operatic adaptation...