Word: nymph
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With the help of the sea nymph Calypso, far-wandering Odysseus prepared to sail for home across the wine-dark sea. But when he had finished his boat, why did he cover the bilge with a layer of brushwood? Generations of scholars have sweated over the passage without producing a satisfactory answer. One theory holds that brush is only a mistranslation of ballast; some classicists argue that Odysseus was merely making a bed. A few despairing translators have ignored the brush entirely. Not until recently, when archaeologists learned to skindive. was the puzzling passage explained...
...well-talcumed nymph lolls whitely against a background of Pepto-Bismol pink, her orange hair providing the final color clash that makes the whole thing undulate provocatively before the eyes. Another, in a great Flanders Field of a poppy-covered hat and a gold choker, stands scornfully akimbo; only the candid bareness of her monolithic bust keeps her from being some long-remembered Miss Gardner scolding the second grade before the class picnic...
...four parts are played in high comic style. Actress Presle portrays without pity the labored cuteness, the varicose ardors of the nymph at 40. Actress Seberg achieves exactly the right matte shade of skin, the look of slightly tainted meat that suggests and ever so slightly caricatures the girl who sleeps around. Actor Perier interprets to absurd perfection the sort of paterfamiliarity that breeds contempt. And Actor Cassel flutters across the screen with the abandon of a butterfly that, without hope of heaven, can at best expect to spend eternity in a cocktail tray...
Corrupted Yalie. Softened by these blows, the boy sags still more when he falls in love with a full-grown nymph (not played by Lahr, but by a half-wrapped nougat named Patricia Englund). And his last ideal cracks like a bone when his friend and adviser, a dedicated artist named Goddard Quagmeyer, sells out to Hollywood, puts on a purple beret, salmon-colored suit, orange ascot, pink shirt, and develops nine simultaneous tics. He is further disillusioned when he meets the president of Charnel House, a publisher with a marked resemblance to Publisher Bennett (Random House) Cerf, who announces...
...felt constrained to leave out the genitals when he painted a floating male figure in Evening, Fall of Day. Ralph Blakelock, who ended his days trying to paint million-dollar bills in a Middletown, N.Y., asylum, possessed a talent that still has the power to haunt. His small Wood Nymph is set in a fantasy forest, as dreamlike as a landscape by Ryder...