Word: penetralia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that we see the penetralia, the first floor has replaced the old reading room with a less sunny one and added a new gallery to the Fogg, and the third floor is devoted to offices and storage. The second-floor "museum," all there is of the old Busch-Reisinger, can only be entered from the Fogg...
Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession is a timely and masterful foray into the practice and penetralia of this modern mystery religion. Timely because since the golden age of piety of the fifties--when Salinger's Seymour Glass frolicked blithely with bananafish while his new bride chatted with her mother about what all the "goddam" analysts thought about that peculiar young man--psychoanalysis has been receding from, the public eye. After these years of gestalt therapy, est, and, yes, hot tubs (who can really believe that a neighborhood of fools sitting in a tub of scalding water is therapy...
...Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus have been praised. There are flashes of the ribald wit that makes his volumes about the British diplomatic corps such delights. But there is also much over writing. The book is littered with show-off phrases such as "alembicated piety" and "the penetralia of one's self-regard." The mixed metaphors are painful: "I lay on the slab, the mortuary slab of my immortal life-twitching like a skate in a frying pan." And the puns are leaden: a Rolls-Royce is a "flatus symbol," lovemaking is a "deathscapade," and a gourmet...
| 1 |