Word: musee
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...marriage in a long, unfinished and unfinishable novel. His wife Maureen--whose perfumed adoration and melodramatic rages recall Charlotte Haze, Lolita's mother--is the instrument which most threatens his manhood, most demands defense through the only means he knows--writing. Maureen claims that she could be Tarnopol's Muse, if only he'd let her. The problem is exactly that she is his Muse, irresistibly, inescapably. She is what his literary psychoanalysis is all about...
...barmaid out of Elmira, N.Y., afflicted by artiness, more than a touch of paranoia and a very odd walk. Roth often seems as baffled as the reader as to why Tarnopol should marry this "cornball Clytemnestra" for whom he feels no affection or even lust. Does Maureen represent the muse of disorder, the Dionysian element every artist suspects he needs? Or is she a case of purest masochism-the general contention of Dr. Spielvogel, Tarnopol's analyst, a literary referral from Portnoy...
Still, one is almost grateful for this opportunity to muse once again over the asininity of the rating system, since the rest of this predictable slice of frontier life (the setting is California's Big Sur country) offers almost nothing to think about. Hannah's response to her groom's welcome is to teach him table manners. He makes some progress toward civility, but he keeps getting distracted. Late in the film he is still capable of driving a herd of cattle through her vegetable garden purely as an exercise in cussedness...
...Christian moralist, appears to agree. His reasons are worked out in a fugue of ideas at the book's end where the exiled, cancerous-perhaps even dead-Napoleon encounters a mysterious female apparition. Since she coldly puts Napoleon in his place, she may well be Clio, the Muse of history...
...concern of Nixon's?unmentioned here but evident in other conversations?is that a special prosecutor, who would coordinate the entire investigation, could not be counted on to keep the President from being involved. Later the President and Kleindienst muse on how things could have gone so awry...