Word: phantasmagoria
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...Rail Tycoon Jay Gould and one of the first of the American heiresses whose marriages infused new blood-and new money-into Europe's sagging aristocracy; of a heart attack; in Paris. Wed to Count Boniface de Castellane in 1895, Anna Gould divorced him after an 11-year phantasmagoria of pink marble palaces and $150,000 parties during which the Parisian gay blade skated through more than half of her $13.5 million inheritance. Two years later, she wed the fifth Duke of Talleyrand, a descendant of the wily French diplomatist whose machinations shaped post-Napoleonic Europe, lived with...
...happened, the lunch never came off. and De Vries, like a character in one of his novels (Comfort Me with Apples, The Mackerel Plaza. The Tunnel of Love), was left wistfully savoring the sour cream of the jest. This touch of rueful, pun-prone phantasmagoria has made 49-year-old Peter De Vries the leading comic geographer of commuterland. Humorist De Vries surveys his world with the wacky vision of a man who has inadvertently put on the wrong pair of glasses...
...Nathan Weinstein, the manager of a small hotel in Manhattan, suffered a strange and horrible schizo-religious vision. Set down in a slim volume called Miss Lonelyhearts, published in 1933 under the pen name of Nathanael West, his experience was acclaimed as a masterpiece of the peculiar literature of phantasmagoria-a vision of hell on earth, a scream of anguish at the meaninglessness of human suffering...
Somewhere behind this nightmare phantasmagoria of publicity and exploitation, however, two human beings were approaching a solemn moment in which each planned to pledge his life to the other. In the maelstrom of confused protocol and embattled public relations, the strain of that moment was beginning to show on each. Rainier fidgeted nervously during the 16-minute civil ceremony in the palace throne room that made them man and wife in the eyes of Monaco law. By the following day, the wear and tear on his fiancée was beginning to show in telltale circles beneath her coolly beautiful...
Williams has created a phantasmagoria of brutality, treachery, corruption, has doused it with sex, punctuated it with farce, dyed it in melodrama. Doubtless the play is at times revolting because it sets out to convey the author's own revulsion; and Camino Real is perhaps excessively pessimistic in reaction against Williams' previous Rose Tattoo, with its factitious "affirmation." But very excessive it is-and not only excessively black, but excessively purple. Camino Real lacks philosophic or dramatic progression (on that score, it might claim the dead-endness of a wasteland), but it also lacks all discipline and measure...