Word: parnassus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...those in the court, some of Dosso's images must have been read as comments on the duke's relaxations. Jupiter, Mercury, and Virtue, circa 1523-24, is Dosso's praise of painting. He translates it to Parnassus, where the god Jupiter sits before a canvas, his administrative thunderbolt laid aside at his feet. Jupiter is painting butterflies--a divine hobbyist. On the right is a figure of Virtue, who has come to complain about the indignities she has had to suffer in the world below. Between them sits Mercury, a finger to his lips, telling her, in effect...
Hunter Thompson launched himself at Parnassus much as he did at everything else, with guns blazing, a bulletproof heart and unflagging dead aim. Yet if the first dirty secret of the 350 or so youthful letters collected in The Proud Highway (Villard; 683 pages.; $29.95) is that the Unabomber of contemporary American letters was writing like a paranoid madman even in his teens, the second is that he was doing so because he was a well-read and ambitious man determined to claim his place in literary history. Meticulously keeping carbons of all his 20,000 letters, and taking himself...