Word: phantasm
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This floating world is but a phantasm...
...most interesting member of the ring, however, was hardly more than a phantasm of pseudonyms: Von Houry / Herzog / Cassou / Hoffman / Raynal / Dory-Boutin. Actually he was a man named Elmyr de Hory, the artist responsible for counterfeiting the countless drawings, gouaches, watercolors and oils sold as Picassos, Matisses, Modiglianis, Braques, Derains, Monets, Légers, Dufys, Renoirs, Vlamincks and Van Dongens. Fake! is basically Elmyr de Hory's story as told to Novelist Clifford Irving (The Valley, The 38th Floor). It is an exuberant collage of skillful innuendo, succulent gossip, bitchery and elusive truths...
...grotesque phantasm of further mutilations follows. The Gnadiges Fraulein is a deaf ex-diva (Leighton) who loses one eye and then the other to the coca-loony birds of the Florida Keys, whom she battles for throwaway fish from incoming sloops. A cocaloony bird struts around on stage looking rather like a giant pelican with a Ph.D., and an Indian in a red, white and blue monokini war-whoops things up. The locale is "the Big Dormitory," and on the porch of this flophouse rock two marijuana-smoking harpies, a slatternly clown (Kate Reid), who runs the joint...
...period is stated; the prisoner's name carries echoes of Roman civic virtue, the jailers' names are Russian, and the executioner is known (in an echo of the French Revolution?) as M'sieur Pierre. The prison itself is timeless, universal, born of an idea turned into phantasm. Its antic rules ("the management shall in no case be responsible for the loss of property or for the inmate himself"), the handless clock on which a watchman hourly paints in the hands, and, above all, the jailers' constant and somehow insane concern for the prisoner's welfare...
...knowledge and in which the highest reaches of scholarship are developed within and between each of the many fields of learning, then Princeton hardly qualifies. Lacking a Law School, a Medical School, a Business School or schools of Education, Drama or Divinity, Princeton University, as such, is a phantasm...