Word: phantasmagoria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...only zealots in sight are willfully credulous European tourists. "You are a people truly young," burbles one foreign girl to the powerless and paralyzed Julio. "Everyone finds happiness in your country." Padilla knows better, and after a chapter or two of this biting phantasmagoria, so do all but the most naive readers...
Last year some 85 million of them were bought in the U.S. for about $900 million. This year (no sunnier than last) the market will grow by 25%, adding up to more than a billion dollars. Never before has there been such a phantasmagoria of shapes, sizes, colors and prices: python, polka-dotted and zebra frames, champagne, vermilion and espresso-colored lenses, asymmetric cat's-eyes and jewelry-bedizened sun helmets that cost thousands of dollars. If price is the object, the glittering Optica shop in Beverly Hills has a pair for $35,000. Foster Grant, the largest...
...designed was the 1975 Glyndebourne version of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, its libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Hockney, never embarrassed about paying homage to his aesthetic hearth gods, did the whole thing in the manner of Hogarth's engravings of that moral phantasmagoria set in 18th century England, stylizing the sets into crosshatched black-and-white etchings. Their graphic wit and punch reached a memorable climax in the final scene, where poor Tom Rakewell, insane at last, finds himself in Bedlam. The wall is covered with graffiti, each one a quotation from Hogarth...
...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...