Word: palimpsestic
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...becoming something, like books or records, that parents can hand down to their kids. For moms and dads tired of vetting the Jackasses and Limp Bizkits of the world, reruns are a haven in the big scary media environment. For kids, they are another manifestation of today's palimpsest pop culture, in which everything is ripe for sampling and nothing stays dead. They have seen the movies morph Charlie's Angels from jiggle joint to empowerment parable; now they can see the reruns, back on TV Land, big sisters once removed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dark Angel. Says...
...There were certainly better female athletes. In tennis alone, Martina Navratilova was her clear superior, and even at her peak she had a pretty hard time with Chris Evert and Margaret Court. Sheryl Swoopes is more dazzling, and Mia Hamm combines finesse and power in what may be a palimpsest for the New Athletic Woman. But before any of them, there was Billie Jean Moffitt King, 20 times a champion at Wimbledon, who changed the way we look at female athletes--and, more important, changed the way they look at one another. "She was a crusader fighting a battle...
...paintings tend to be objects: thick wooden boards, never canvas, and heavily framed. The paint is constantly reworked--not fiddled with, but glazed and obliterated over the years by successive coats. Each is a palimpsest, one improvisation partly burying another but leaving hints of it behind. Pigment covers the frame as well as the board, wanting to overrun the confines of surface. Even when Hodgkin's paintings are on the wall, you think of picking them up, the small ones especially, and hefting them in your hand. Dense, resistant lumps of color, real things in the real world--a status...
...novels and plays, often come across as wooden and two dimensional. He complains over and over to the reader of his frayed memory, his disinclination to look backward, his lack of a diary (he relies altogether too much on other people's memoirs instead). As a result, Palimpsest has a kind of haphazard feel, with the present frequently intruding upon the past in a way that distracts from his narrative. (''The editor of the [New York Times] editorial page just rang up; he will come to lunch on Monday...
...Palimpsest is enjoyable as a kind of highbrow gossip column (the famous names could be in boldface), but it lacks the analytical substance that one has come to expect from its author. In a lovely passage, Vidal says he learned from his grandfather ''the ability to detect the false notes in those arias that our shepherds lull their sheep with"--and in fact his story sparkles when he deftly exposes the hypocrisies of Hollywood and Washington. As a writer he is at his best as an uncompromising critic, and at one point turns his sensibility on himself with sharp-eyed...