Word: phantasmagoria
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more than two miles thick, are towering mountains, volcanoes, and glaciers as big as Rhode Island that creep inexorably toward the sea at rates up to two miles a year. There are even curious, snow-free "dry valleys" where the winds have sculpted the rocks into a phantasmagoria of surreal shapes...
...part, the white world, which both made and denied that home, has behaved within its own set of distortions. Out of its abiding guilt it has created a code of self-protecting lies, including a sexual phantasmagoria about blacks that has resulted in everything from cheap jokes to lynchings. (In black novels, heroes fear the accusation of rape far more than that of murder.) Guilt has also created stereotypes. In a poem on the comic actor Willie Best, LeRoi Jones listed the unlaughable characteristics: "Lazy/ Frightened/ Thieving/ Very potent sexually/ Scars/ Generally inferior/ But natural rhythms." White America has also...
...least rewarding is the first of the three, Silverman's Madame Adare. Using a libretto by Richard Foreman, his longtime collaborator, the composer has written a fantasy, or more precisely a phantasmagoria, about psychoanalysis and creativity. As the piece begins, Miss Adare, played by Soprano Carol Gutknecht, is seeing her psychiatrist Dr. Hoffman (Bass-Baritone Richard Cross). Her problem: she cannot make up her mind whether she wants to be an opera star or a movie star, and while she dallies, she cannot even make enough money to pay for her sessions. When Hoffman refuses to treat her again...
Oddly, the work that is relatively the most familiar, and historically the most significant, turns out to be the most disappointing. Erwartung (Expectation) is a half-hour Expressionist phantasmagoria in which a woman wanders a forest at night, yearning for a lover who has left her (or whom she may have killed), then finds his corpse (or imagines she has found it). The score, composed in 1909, broke down harmony until it had no real key, fragmented melody into an apparently unrelated succession of motifs and dissolved all structure by avoiding repetitions. It was as though Schoenberg felt a need...
...quite a saga, a tale of horrors seeping forth from a real-life phantasmagoria. Thomas Murton writes of Arkansas' Tucker State Prison Farm as it was before he was brought in for a year as a reform superintendent in 1967: "Discipline was routinely enforced by flogging, beating with clubs, inserting of needles under fingernails, crushing of testicles with pliers, and the last word in torture devices: the 'Tucker telephone,' an instrument used to send an electric current through genitals." In Jail: The Ultimate Ghetto, Ronald Goldfarb records so many atrocities of prison life that the reader...