Word: narcissus
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...Mediterranean cruise, The Painted Lady is more than entertaining; its verve and humor disguise a serious work. Sagan's cruise has a musical motif; the deluxe passengers have each paid $15,000 to listen to a virtuoso pianist and a celebrated diva perform aboard a ship pointedly christened Narcissus. The lure is also gastronomical: "The port of call determined the musical work, and the musical work determined the menu. These delicate musical relationships, hesitant at first, had bit by bit been transformed into invariable ritual, even if it occasionally happened that the sudden decay of a tournedos necessitated...
That kind of disgrace does not encourage nostalgia. In an interview last week with Diane Sawyer of CBS, Nixon said, "Remember Lot's wife. Never look back!" He suggested that those who obsessively revisit Watergate may suffer from "Narcissus complexes." Nixon and the others from his crew (most of whom he threw overboard at the last moment, the captain struggling to be the last to go) will never gather at some hotel in, say, San Clemente, to share memories and souvenirs-enemies lists, voice-activated taping systems, smoking guns, the moral compasses that they lost...
...Gentleman," left his native country at age 16. Between then and the age of 40, he voyaged all over the world, soaking up South American background for stories like Nostromo and Caspar Ruiz, working on sailing ships, where his experiences served as the basis for The Nigger of the Narcissus. He joined a steamship expedition up the Congo, which became the setting for Heart of Darkness. The circumstances of his life would seem to require little exaggeration, but Conrad loved to romanticize everything, including himself. As Tennant shows, he probably never ran guns to Spain's Carlist rebels...
...flowers so much as an urban person's idea of a flower, the sort of thing you might find decorating the Citicorp lobby, or around Lincoln Center's glass and steel and concrete. The center of the stage is a huge black reflecting pool, a tar pit to trap Narcissus; around it is a path of Harvard Square brick, and around that a "lawn" of torn Hefty bags. Everything is unhealthy and artificial, beautiful in its way, but beautiful for adults only. Welcome to the East Side...
...classical heads that fill the Vollard suite and spill over into innumerable drawings and gouaches of the 1930s are not the conventional decor of antiquity. They are more like emblems of autobiography, acts of passionate self-identification. Picasso's Minotaur, now young and self-regarding, fresh as a Narcissus with horns, now bowed under the bison-like weight of his own grizzled head, is Picasso himself. His Mediterranean images are the last appearance, in serious art, of the symbols of that once Arcadian coast...