Word: surfeited
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...good Lord must love the nouveaux riches, because he made so many of them. He also seems to have provided a surfeit of writers to turn their freshly gilded lives into trashy novels. Among recent scribes who specialize in pressing readers' noses against the glass that separates them from the best of everything is Dominick Dunne (The Two Mrs. Grenvilles). His latest is sodden with the sort of unimaginative stock characters that have tumbled out of all the rich-and-famous pseudo fiction of the 1980s. The setting is Manhattan's Upper East Side, the pricey arena where old-moneyed...
...literal a gift from the gods to him as Valhalla had been to Wagner. Gauguin was no anthropologist but a romantic looking for pity and terror among the vestiges of a lost Golden Age. Certainly his flight to the Marquesas was inspired by a wide reaction against Western cultural surfeit, against an industrial France fixated on money and "development." But the life he forged from his discontents, though not without moments of bathos, was deeply courageous. He tried what others in the Paris cafes only talked about...
...defect that occasionally caused engine fires. Fiero's demise may also have been helped along by steep insurance rates, which ran as high as $5,000 in some states because the young unmarried men who favored the auto were generally considered high-risk drivers. Fiero suffered too from a surfeit of two- seaters. With as many as five other such cars seeking a chunk of a dwindling market, Fiero sales fell from nearly 102,000 in 1984 to 47,000 last year. This year analysts expected sales to drop...
Consider, as Green must, the realities of the other nine months. Dropout rates approach 90% in some ghetto schools and -- depending on who is counting -- 30% to 55% citywide. A surfeit of aging buildings crumble in disrepair. Desks occasionally spill out of overcrowded classrooms into hallways prowled by student hoodlums who "have been bringing weapons to school for years," says one principal. An overpowerful custodian's union, whose president was killed last year in what police described as a gangland-style rubout, dictates the hours schools will be open. Tenured high school principals cannot be fired without interminable hearings. Under...
...surfeit arises from the sheer size of the show. Its catalog lists 748 items, ranging from a corroded metal pen to a whole stained-glass lancet window from Canterbury Cathedral. It covers manuscripts, paintings, maps, jewelry, seals, coins, heraldry, enamelwork, ceramics, armor, textiles, architecture and a great deal more besides. It traces the patronage of five Plantagenet kings and has a lot to say about how works of art were commissioned by the nobility and the great merchants, executed by their makers and read by the audience. It wanders off into didactic byways and outlines, among other things, the changing...