Word: nacreous
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...make him a master of this demanding form. More Stately Mansions is balanced on two provocative images, a cross section of a nautilus shell and a big Victorian house, "with all its rooms and this naked freckled woman waiting in one of its chambers." The story itself has the nacreous quality of an old memory; the narrator, a biology teacher in a declining New England mill town, recalls his affair with a California woman who is married to the city's last factory owner. The period is the early '70s with its antiwar politics, new feminists, ecology, astrology and unrevocable...
...show, Homage to the Poet Léon Gontran Damas, 1978, has an almost majestic aura of open declamation. More delicate and complex in feeling is Howardena Pindell's large, irregular patch of canvas, covered with a silvery-pink crust of paint, sequins, confetti and dye, in whose nacreous surface also appears a slow twinkling of glitter. Entitled December 31, 1980: Brazil: Feast Day lemanjá, it refers to the goddess of salt water in the Brazilian macumba cult, whose votaries send out little silver-painted boats laden with flowers, perfumed soap and mirrors as offerings (if they sink...
Dibbets, 36, is preoccupied with landscape: flat swaths of beach horizon, photographed in nacreous blues and grays, enlarged, tilted and cut together in the form of mountains or-in this show-the curving tail of a comet. They are, in effect, "impossible" earthworks, or sky works, meant solely as configurations on paper: a simplistic idea, but carried out with elegance...
...fool." Trout has been invited to give a speech at the Midland City Festival of the Arts, and he hitchhikes to Midland City. He arrives on the wrong side of town and wades through a polluted creek that leaves his feet sealed in a coating of liquid plastic. Defiantly nacreous-footed, he wanders on into the motel cocktail lounge where Dwayne Hoover, after several drinks, staggers up to him and cries: "Give me the message! The message, please." Kilgore Trout thrusts forth one of his 117 unsuccessful novels, whose message is, "You are the only creature in the entire universe...
...longtime Goethe fan, Poet W. H. Auden is neither awed nor incapable. In attempts to make the formidable German more accessible, Auden and his collaborator, Elizabeth Mayer, have bypassed the nacreous brilliance of Goethe's complex imagery and the Gluhwein dark of such things as Faust, Part II. Instead they settled on Goethe's prose journal of his 20-month trip to Italy in 1786. Ostensibly, the book is a readable travelogue in the "dawn found us at the Apennines" tradition. But it is also an account of the most decisive period of Goethe's life, when...