Word: mordant
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...this might be impossibly fey were it not for the down-but-not-quite-out sensibilities of the two writers. Waits, the bard of last-chance saloons, has never taken deader aim at the line that separates the mordant from the maudlin. On the one hand, there's November, a bitter hymn to the month that "only believes in a pile of dead leaves/ And a moon that's the color of bone." On the other, there's I'll Shoot the Moon, in which Kathchen, daydreaming about her lover, vows to "be the pennies on your eyes" and "build...
...nuisance," he decided to become a writer. His literary hero was Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who, after reading White's first two books, proclaimed him his favorite American author. White's fiction, like Nabokov's, is marked by the combination of a baroque linguistic sensibility with a mordant picture of middle America. White says he has always written as "a representative member of my generation of gay men." That purpose has not limited his work, which ranges from the lyrical abstraction of the early Nocturnes for the King of Naples to the more straightforwardly autobiographical...
...Naked. The first view of him could not be more savage. In a dark, scabrous alley he has shoved a woman against a wall and is raping her. For the next two hours, he stumbles through a London nighttown of despairing, inarticulate souls, watching with embittered eyes and delivering mordant, nonstop opinions on everything from Homer to Nostradamus to the Berlin Wall. When last seen, he has been severely beaten and is limping down the middle of a suburban street in an eerie dance to nowhere. As he says, there are plenty of places to go, the problem is where...
...Werner is most known for her trenchant wit and mordant bon mots, but on that dreary afternoon we sought her out--not without some trepidation, for stories of her cruelty to the media are legion--to chat about her new project, a rock/operatic adaptation of Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park." The project has been the topic of conversation in the best dining halls and common rooms this season, in no small part because of Ms. Werner's alleged connections to organized crime (which have never been substantiated, as she is quick to point...
...thick pastes, an excremental vision parallel to Jarry's. One of the portraits of French intellectuals in his extravagantly controversial 1947 show at the Galerie Rene Drouin depicted the Surrealist writer Georges Limbour under the title Limbour Fashioned from Chicken Droppings. And even critics who disliked such mordant images were right on target about the context into which Dubuffet emerged, that of a postwar Paris depressed by material shortages and riven by political suspicions. "An empty pantry," wrote one critic, "assures the triumph of a Dubuffet...