Word: metaphoric
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...FRONTISPIECE ofSelf Helpis adorned with, among other bizarre items, a quote from Sex Lives of Animals Without Backbones which provides a metaphor for relationships that's as apt (and unromantic) as they come. The excerpted passage notes that certain invertebrates "lose an arm while mating," and is immediately followed by a ghoulish bit of advice from The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette: "If you start to shake hands with someone who has lost an arm, shake his other hand...
Like many sweet old buffers, he admired authority. He painted the artists lining up for the Salon des Independants as an army of black-clad troops, carrying paintings of identical size; it was a parody of the military metaphor of the avant-garde. Rousseau wanted honors, like his heroes. When the French government sent him a decoration by mistake he would not send it back, and obstinately wore its violet rosette for the rest of his life. It was the Palmes Academiques--a serendipitous fluke, in view of his obsession with exotic scenes of distant jungles...
...dubbed Gopher Prairie, which no one ever seriously doubted was inspired by Sauk Centre. Gopher Prairie was drawn as smug, suspicious and stuck in its ways, and that was a liberating vision for a newly urban America about to plunge into the jazz age. Main Street became a metaphor for a certain kind of narrow-minded, self-satisfied, credulous America; Lewis' Babbitt and Elmer Gantry completed the picture. In 1930, when Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sauk Centre's role as national small-town bellwether was set for good...
...hoopla isn't all commerce; a lot of it is pride and affection. "He put Sauk Centre on the map," approved the 8:30 a.m. coffee crowd at the Palmer House Hotel. True enough. No one ever made a metaphor out of neighboring Long Prairie or Gutches Grove or Alexandria...
...lighting effects are spectacular. Nothing is presented in the clear light of day, but rather in a dim and slightly mottled gloom, punctuated occasionally by the lurid light of a blood-red sky. Furtive figures frantically seek to escape this depressing darkness, a darkness that almost becomes a metaphor for Quint's malevolence. Clever special effects make the two ghosts seem especially spectral. While the evil former man-servant appears and vanishes high at the top of the tower. Miss Jessel is lit from below, a technique which illuminates her grotesquels painted face and casts an abnormally immense black shadow...