Word: wagnerism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this tradition. One is superb; another, which could easily have been dismissed as a curiosity, has surprising merit; while the third, the most eagerly anticipated of the three, falls well short of expectations. The cities: Los Angeles, Washington and New York. The books: I'm Losing You by Bruce Wagner (Villard; 319 pages; $23), Powertown by Michael Lind (HarperCollins; 264 pages; $23) and Manhattan Nocturne by Colin Harrison (Crown; 355 pages; $24). The themes: sex, power and degradation; sex, racism and violence; sex, murder and a 300-lb. version of Rupert Murdoch...
...same keys--decadence, emptiness, bad faith. There's an essential hypocrisy to these sorts of books. While they self-importantly lay bare the meaninglessness of celebrity worship, they simultaneously exploit that very failing--an insatiable desire to read about the movie business. For I'm Losing You, Wagner has indeed rounded up the usual suspects: nihilistic agents, pornographers, washed-up producers, depraved plastic surgeons. And they are indeed doing the usual things: having soulless sex, taking drugs, using each other. Nevertheless, Wagner has written a novel of disciplined excess, with beautifully concentrated prose and a sometimes heartbreaking polyphony of voices...
...Stein gives birth to a son who is blind, and she writes moving letters to him ("I'm sitting beside you as I write; the faintest light falls upon your marzipan cheek. You're the sweetest plum..."), while her TV-producer husband descends into crack addiction. The content of Wagner's satire of Hollywood is not particularly fresh, and the sexual grotesques that fill his book are the common currency of fiction these days. But the particulars of the author's images, tones and language give I'm Losing You a hard beauty that glints like a black crystal...
Though winless in the Ancient Eight, the Lions roared last week. Columbia (5-1-0, 0-1-0) won all three games it played, defeating Army, Wagner and Central Connecticut. The win against Army was the first in 11 tries...
...teacher at the Claremont colleges, walked into their bedroom and killed himself. His widow's agony and incomprehension, in poems reflecting lost love, all but leap from page to reader's eye. "One Ordinary Evening" revisits a moment of marital intimacy: entwined on a sofa, they listen to Wagner on the phonograph. Then...