Word: pyre
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...textbooks included short stories by James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, other radicals. One of the formative experiences of my life was seeing Avis Hill lead a group of women down a street in Charleston to the building that houses the school board, where they built a pyre of the godless books. They were singing "We Shall Overcome...
...eight stagehands to operate. London's conception is not perfect: he may not put the Valkyries on wheels, but having them cavort like chorus girls is not an improvement. There is no bear for Siegfried to tug, alas, nor does Brünnhilde ride a horse into the pyre. But she does sleep on a genuine jagged peak-not just some symbolic platform. Reversing another current fashion, London puts light rather than gloom on everything, and the operagoer does not have to view the whole show through a front scrim...
...crisp tang of frying writers and directors whetted my appetite. How good it was to be alive, I thought, inhaling deep lungfuls of carbon monoxide... A suttee was in progress by the road side... Violet and I elbowed our way through the crowd. An enormous funeral pyre composed of thousands of feet of film and scripts drenched with Chanel Number 5 awaited the torch of Jack Holt who was to act as master of ceremonies..." I wish that when John Schlesinger had made Day of the Locust he had paid a little attention to S.J. Perelman (see above) so that...
Think of Shelley, who died by drowning and whose heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by his fellow romantic, Trelawney. Or of Dylan Thomas, a sacrificial votary of drink (Olympian draughts, of course). Since the winter day in 1963 when Sylvia Plath turned on the gas and laid her head in her kitchen oven, she has become a goddess of the thanatophiliacs...
...novel ends, Honda, who has begun to sound like a Japanese Humbert Humbert in his pursuit of his Thai princess-now a student in Japan-secretly watches her in a lesbian embrace. Then Honda's mansion at the foot of Mount Fuji burns to the ground like a pyre at Benares, the flyaway ashes sporadically sizzling into his new swimming pool. The combination of filigreed Oriental pornography and slightly cheap Götterdämmerung has sometimes been a contaminating tendency in Mishima's work. But the rest of the book plausibly suggests a writer whose gifts amount...