Word: petronian
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...According to Gershwin biographer Edward Jablonski, Kaufman and Ryskind wrote the whole first act in 16 days. Seeing the show today, smiling at some jokes, groaning at others, you may ask, "It took that long?" This was a script built for laughs, not to last. It's less a Petronian satire than a Catskills burlesque, reveling in fake French ("Garcon, s'il vous plait, / Encore, Chevrolet coupe") and real Yiddish, as when French soldiers sing, "A vous toot dir veh, a vous?" and the nine Supreme Court justices declare, "We're the A.K.'s / Who give...
Charges that fast-food uniformity is turning the U.S. into the land of the bland should not be swallowed. A Big Mac may be a Big Mac wherever one roams, but in the interstices of the chains a Petronian diversity of foodstuffs is being sold with dispatch. On the Fourth, New Englanders will be flocking to Clam Shacks for rolls stuffed with batter-fried whole quahogs or steamers. Sightseers in Plains, Ga., will stop at the Americus outlet of McWaffles, which puts peanuts in the batter and serves "the Presidential Waffle" with a side order of peanut butter...
...swollen bureaucracy and licentiousness became the ordure of the day. "We are arrived at the zenith of vice," boomed Juvenal, "and posterity will never be able to surpass us." Perhaps not, but it seems to be making a vigorous effort. The massage salons of American towns are versions of Petronian ritual; Penthouse and Hustler proliferate on New York newsstands; Pompeii had its pornography memorialized in frescoes...
Schuyler's comments (see box) are themselves worth the price of the novel. Vidal has no peers at breathing movement and laughter into the historical past. His book teems with offbeat details: Tilden's dyspepsia and private collection of erotic literature; the Petronian orgy of a White House banquet ("25 courses and six good wines"); the surprisingly low and musical quality of Grant's voice. Even though the results have been in for 100 years, Vidal marshals his research so that the 1876 election reads like a cliffhanger...
Vulgarian's Feast. The true Satyricon is shot through with fragments of poetry. The Fellini Satyricon finds visual equivalents-but often at the price of coherence. Scenes are shifted, new ones are added, characters are blunted or sharpened. Still, Fellini has left the Petronian framework intact. Like almost all his social satire, Satyricon is a picaresque journey through the beds and banquet hails of Rome. Now Encolpius skirmishes for the affections of the young invert Giton (Max Born); now impotent, he whimpers about his "blunted sword"; now he overstuffs his gullet at a vulgarian's feast...
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