Word: mistress
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Forty," an honorary association of artists whose aging members no longer find anyone younger worthy of filling vacancies left by the deceased. "If we don't ever manage to elect anybody," Bech lectures the group, "the institution will dwindle to nothing." Who would care? Not Bech's current mistress, Martina, who dismisses the Forty as "a bunch of mostly New York City has-beens electing themselves." Updike has one surprise for his beleaguered hero: the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. Anyone who thinks this stunning recognition will at long last make Bech at age 74 happy and fulfilled underestimates...
...that English is sexist. The language provides dozens of negative words for a sexually active female (slut, ho, harlot) and not one for a male (stud?). It refers to groups as "you guys" when no men are present. It calls someone who presides and perfects a "master," while a "mistress" wallows in feminine immorality...
...painting that turned Wynn away from the 19th century into the 20th--and, as he puts it, "got me off my training wheels"--was a portrait by Picasso of his long-suffering mistress Dora Maar, done in 1942. This riveting image is one of a woman in disequilibrium, not as fiercely torn apart as she is in the Weeping Women of those years, but out of kilter all the same, with staring eyes, figure-eight nostrils flared as though in suppressed fright, and strange asymmetries of form around the nose and brow. Compared with it, Impressionism began to look somewhat...
...with touches not found on the Cote d'Azur, such as a carpet by Claude Picasso and a ceiling in the entrance hall thickly lined with broken amphorae brought in from Mexico. The paintings--still lifes from the '40s, and a lush little jewel of a head of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter--actually look terrific in here, with the bright desert light streaming through the high windows...
...this the hushed lyricism of Jenny Giering's I Follow and the mordant merriment of Michael John LaChiusa's Mistress of the Senator, and you've got a collection guaranteed to make intelligent theater-music fans prick up their ears. There's only one catch: Way Back to Paradise contains scenes, arias, and even full-blown art songs. But nostalgia-hungry listeners will search in vain among these determinedly theatrical post-Sondheim musical monologues for anything resembling the straightforward, crisply turned lyrics and incisive 32-bar melodies that for decades defined American popular music at its best...