Word: mock
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...situation. Whenever Nathan goes out, he is reminded that "life has its own flippant ideas about how to handle serious fellows like Zuckerman." The statement is a blueprint for the novel, a string of introspections and encounters designed to mock Nathan's austerity and high artistic purpose...
...social-climbing instinct--then hops down, nods furtively and scurries by the legs of the audience with some submissive mutters of "excuse me." The moment when the jealous Count gives Cherubino an army officer's commission to remove him from the scene--immortalized by Mozart in his mock-heroic, trumpet-and-drum aria "Non piu andrai..."--Epstein appropriates for a bit of grisly realism: Figaro grabs Cherubino by the shoulders and shakes him into an awareness of the horrors...
...Yorker, that dual bastion and mausoleum of literacy, where Arlen's "The Air" column regularly appears. The New Yorker's literacy is a curious one, of course, harking back to the most Anglophilic time in our history. It is a magazine to be read in a mock-British accent, or at least some boarding school equivalent--and Arlen is something of the quintessential New Yorker writer. It seems odd, then, to see him turn his meticulous attention to the quintessential chasm in American taste--namely television--but the results are often brilliant. Arlen doesn't so much watch television...
They are not, in any sense, portraits of Beautiful People. Every wrinkle, bulge and sag in their flesh is colossally magnified: a face 9 ft. high is no longer a face but a wall of imperfections that mock the convention of "good looks." The face is always seen head on, like a mug shot or a passport photo; yet it is blown up to the size of some staring mosaic Pantocrator on a Byzantine a pse. These are, of course, the portraits by Chuck Close-familiar items in the art of the 1970s-now gathered in a retrospective of Close...
Generally, luck is something that happens to individuals. If a society or a century is considered as a whole, the random individual events that are set down to luck or fortune form more coherent overall patterns; large historical forces become discernible. But entire societies should not mock luck either. The classic Mayan civilization disappeared so strangely, so precipitously, that some massive stroke of bad luck must have been at work-a sudden plague, say, a viral riot...