Word: paleness
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Sensuality is an underappreciated quality in Nabokov's writing, and with good reason. Sinfully rich novels like The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pale Fire and even that great American road novel Lolita are cleverly defended against casual entry. Nabokov's short fictions, on the other hand, are thresholds to his themes and some of the most nape-tingling prose and devilish inventions in 20th century letters. So better late than never, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Knopf; 659 pages; $35) is a welcome edition to the shelves of old admirers and a chance for entry-level fans...
...with the spending bills heading for Clinton's desk, the quiet is ending. After months of searching for issues that will cut their way, battered Democrats have awakened to the political advantage of forming a Praetorian Guard around Mother Earth. Though Clinton has been accused of being just pale green, especially after he retreated in 1993 from imposing new grazing fees on federal lands, the White House has got the message. Al Gore, a best-selling conservationist, two weeks ago denounced Republicans on the Hill for a "jihad against the environment'' that had allowed lobbyists from "the biggest polluters...
...shame that our people fear the government?" he asked the Park Rapids audience. He wore a white Western shirt and new Wrangler jeans that arced below a belly well accustomed to butter, eggs and beef. His head bore the usual stigmata of a ranching life: pale baby-smooth forehead over a raw, wind-scrubbed face. He eyed the crowd a moment, then answered his rhetorical question: "That's tyranny...
...work begins with landscape--the delicate screens and friezes of trees above watery meadows, in their pearly gray light. The color explodes in 1908 with his Mill in Sunlight, an orgiastic response to Van Gogh, blazing with flakes of crimson and ultramarine against a sky of lemon yellow and pale blue; it is stabilized in another painting of a red mill done in 1911--its dark red trunk rising patriarchally against deep blue sky, spreading its austere vanes like the arms of Moses...
...crosses, shifts and erasures, within an oval field of view. In the end, this breaking and reassembly of a motif go so far that only the barest clues to its identity remain--whether it is a tree, a seascape or the walls of half-demolished Paris apartments, their pale pink and blue distemper preserved in delicately tinted planes. In the '20s, the severe lucidity of his grids abolished all metaphor and memory. But they would return in the '40s, in New York...