Word: venusized
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...SAINT VENUS by Anthony Burgess. 138 pages. Norton...
...English themselves freely concede that the pleasures of love are something that foreigners are better at. Aphrodite, after all, was a Greek, and Venus a Latin...
Publishing this little work (or opusculum, as Burgess calls it) 20 years after he wrote it and six years after it came out in England, the author also issues a fair warning. The Eve of Saint Venus, he says, "depends for its effect largely on an understanding of the insular and conservative English character, especially as manifested in a silly, ingrown, mainly nonexistent rural aristocracy...
Plummer and Carson came upon their theory while studying an entirely different planet-Venus. To determine the possible composition of the yellowish white atmosphere of Venus they decided to experiment with a little-known, foul-smelling liquid called carbon suboxide (C3O2). As the physicists increased its temperature, the compound solidified and underwent a series of color changes from pale yellow to orange, reddish brown, purple and a shade approaching black. Although the yellow vaguely resembled the tint of Venusian clouds, the range of colors was far more suggestive of the surface of Mars, which undergoes still unexplained variations in shading...
Still, no one else could have brought a tenth of the Satyricon to the screen without the customary lubricity and X-rated smirks. When, in a climactic scene, Encolpius recovers his potency at the thighs of a gigantic black Venus, the viewer feels less a voyeur than an observer of some elemental sexual ritual brought intact from the beginning of the world. To be sure, between such moments, the film proves so personal that it amounts to solipsism. "The pearl," as the director once modestly observed, "is only the oyster's autobiography." Fellini Satyricon, at the end, may even...