Word: poseur
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Biographer Day shows a good deal of discernment when treating Lowry as a charming poseur. He quotes some apt lines from Auden's In Praise of Limestone that characterize those youths who are unable To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral/ And not to be pacified by a clever line/ Or a good...
...other people's personalities in much the way the Pedersens craved morphine, whisky and candy. Neither the author nor the reader is ever quite sure just what Vogel is-a series of conditioned reflexes linked to some sort of life force; a mechanistic particle of personalities; a maddened poseur. Only Vogel's wife suggests that her husband consists of "real units of personality, tissue or atoms or nerve cells, bits of flesh that are real and not imaginary, not insane." It is a mysterious, chilling and thoroughly unresolved idea that Miss Oates pursues with pure intuition, great narrative...
Still, Rosen also knows that even the most skillful poseur benefits from moments of self-revelation. His book does aspire, successfully too, towards a correspondingly mannered honesty. And so Harvard tortures him with its promises of success and its undercurrent of failure. "We would have liked, some of us, to escape the richness of Harvard, the concentration of things, the density of thought, the involuted lives observing themselves," he writes. Instead, he finds himself seated at Robert Lowell's poetry seminar, "a whole class yearning for excellence. We didn't see in the resignation and gentleness of his [Lowell...
...living legend, and for this he largely has photographers to thank. As a stocky, bare-chested figure with burning black eyes who would strike poses as dramatic as his paintings and don any kind of outlandish costume, he has at times come perilously close to being taken for a poseur. What the cult of personality obscures is the degree to which Picasso has always been his own self-generating...
Edward Albee can be trusted as a bartender, an unleasher of tirades of aggression, a put-down comedian, and a lover of English whose sentences curl with the involuted beauty of a sea shell, but when he puts on his thinking cap, he is a poseur. To embrace everyone is to be no one. A Delicate Balance is a wish for oblivion posing as a plea for love, and its fine cast and funny lines cannot hide its phony bones...