Word: palimpsests
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Vidal turns 70 this month, a fitting time for a man of letters to turn his hand to recollections. But in Palimpsest (Random House; 438 pages; $27.50), he proves a reluctant memoirist. Elsewhere he has confessed that he only embarked on this book in order to stay a step ahead of two biographers. For Vidal the resurrection of his early life (the story ends when he is 39) seems to be an irksome enterprise, and the book reads that...
...place with relatively little industry and few cars, clean air and no traffic. Though neglected, architectural gems like the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient and the former Bank of Indochina were resurrectable. ``For anyone interested in architectural questions, Hanoi is where the action is because there has been this palimpsest of time,'' says John Stubbs, program director of the World Monuments Fund. ``The Vietnamese can possibly learn from others' mistakes...
...have an alite of artists, to be viewed by nonartists as something like priests or professionals? Or does the joining of many hands in a collaborative work express a kind of treaty between rival groups? Or were the paintings added to over generations, producing the crowded, palimpsest-like effect suggested by some of the photos...
...rhythms of '40s De Kooning. In effect, he turned Pollock's rococo lacework into its cruder cousin, graffiti. Did this imply a degree of loss? Certainly; but loss (and a barely suppressed anger at it) is one of the chief themes of Twombly's art. Its model is the palimpsest, the document in which a later text effaces the earlier...
...this point it is clear how much, subliminally or not, Giacometti has meant to Rothenberg. This probing for form through a web, a mist of approximate lines, so that the never-quite-final shape becomes a palimpsest of recorded attempts to fix it, echoes Giacometti's own anxiety before his subjects. How can the artist be sure, and make you sure, what is there? For Rothenberg the problem becomes worse, because she chooses subjects in movement, the opposite of Giacometti's hieratic stillness. It does not always come off, but when it does you are made sharply aware...