Word: ostend
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...bravura of needlepoint. It helps to be a recluse to master etching. One who was, and did, is James Sydney Ensor, Belgium's premier fantasist of the 20th century, who spent only three of his 89 years of life away from the seaport town of Ostend...
Ensor sought omens of a different sort in the world he knew. He detested the mob for its human hebetude. Every year, Ostend had a carnival whose revelers, it seemed to him, lost their sense of identity behind their garish masks. Without straying far from his family's souvenir shop, Ensor detailed the seven deadly sins in modern dress, and added a few of his own observation. He often showed Christ not as an object of adoration but as an unmasked redeemer swamped in a sea of masquerade...
...week, creating a formal language barrier across the land. Dutch will be the official tongue in the Flemish north, French in the Walloon-dominated south, with pockets of both peoples stranded on the wrong side. Months of demonstrations culminated last week when hundreds of Flemings clashed with Walloons at Ostend...
...Ghelderode often took his inspiration from the canvases of Flemish painters. His Magpie on the Gallows, for example, takes its name and theme from Pieter Brueghel's painting, in which sturdy peasants dance defiantly in the shadow of the gallows. In a series of radio interviews recorded in Ostend twelve years ago, known to fans as "The Ostend Interviews," Ghelderode offered probably the only deep glimpse into his habits and personality that he permitted during his lifetime...
Except for a few excursions into Brussels, he mostly spent his life in the seaport of Ostend, where he was born in 1860. His father, raised in England and Belgium, and Belgian mother indulged him shamelessly. He lasted exactly two years in school, lived in a world of fairy tales, nightmares, the fascinating clutter of his parents' curio shop and an attic that was "full of horrible spiders, shells, old clothing the color of rust and blood, red and white corals, monkeys, turtles, dried mermaids and stuffed Chinamen...