Word: muses
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...from coast to coast. This time the Clintons rejected a suggestion that five-year-olds build a Tinker Toy bridge to the 21st century--too frivolous, they decided. The President spent hours sweating the details of Monday morning's national prayer service and handpicked Arkansas poet Miller Williams to muse at the swearing in. "The President and First Lady wanted it to be less of a megillah," said a West Wing official. "Simple" and "elegant" are the terms Clinton officials want applied to it when it's over...
...prefigured in the first of his triptychs, Departure, 1932-33. Its left and right panels contain scenes of horror, torment and dislocation: a man with amputated hands tied to a pillar, a woman in bondage about to be axed by a headsman, another woman with a lamp (perhaps a muse or a guide) to whom the upside-down corpse of her partner is bound. One cannot decode these too literally, but they presumably represent the chaos overtaking Beckmann's homeland. The center panel portrays the artist's dream of escape. The blue horizon (the color of peace) beckons; the king...
Visotzky sought to settle his Genesis crisis in a way that came naturally to him: through Bible study. Some time before, when Visotzky, a professor at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary, had first begun to muse about the work's peculiarities, he had initiated in the school's cafeteria a monthly dinner discussion dedicated to making its way through the book a chapter at a time. Instead of the academics and rabbis who were his usual conversation partners, however, he stocked the group with an interfaith roster of fiction writers, hoping they might have insight into human character...
...rosy-fingered dawns"--were actually stock formulas allowing the bard to fill out his line of verse and get on with the story. The pressure on these performers, composing while they spoke or sang, must have been intense. Seen in this light, the poet's invocations to the Muse for inspiration at the beginning of the Iliad and the Odyssey have a dimension beyond the religious; these pleas could also represent a nervous bard, faced with a gathering of drowsy aristocrats, saying God help...
...Odyssey starts out speedily: "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns/ driven time and again off course, once he had plundered/ the hallowed halls of Troy." That man, of course, is Odysseus, the epic hero of all that is to follow, and in calling him "the man of twists and turns" Fagles signals his commitment to economical, concrete descriptions. Fitzgerald's translation introduces Odysseus as "that man skilled in all ways of contending." Some readers may prefer Fitzgerald's rendering, of course, but the contrast shows clearly the straightforward method Fagles pursues...