Word: goddess
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...officials had decided to name two craters on the planet Venus in honor of McAuliffe and Resnik. The Soviets had discovered the craters via space probes. Only the women among the American space victims were selected because the Soviets respect the view in Roman mythology that Venus is the goddess of beauty. Several Soviet cosmonauts sent a collective note of sympathy directly to NASA. Soviet citizens seemed to share the sentiment. "When something like this happens," said a Moscow factory worker named Yelena, "we are neither Russians nor Americans. We all just feel sorry for those who died...
Graves' poetry was more austere and subdued. He took no part in the stylistic revolution launched by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His poems stubbornly scanned and usually rhymed. In The White Goddess (1948), he built a huge edifice of eccentric scholarship to prove a personal point: poetry arose in the worship of the Ur-Female and could only be brought back to life by returning to this adoration. That was his lifelong mission, and his love poems praised both joy and sorrow: "Take your delight in momentariness,/ Walk between dark and dark--a shining space/ With the grave...
...Deia, Majorca, Spain. Graves began publishing his precise, sensuous lyrics while an officer in World War I, during which he was seriously wounded; he recounted that part of his life in the popular autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929). Among his most controversial works was The White Goddess (1948), an erudite but eccentric study of poetic myth...
...inconclusive liaisons with scores of men, from anonymous pickups to Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and Yves Montand. With the help of some 600 new interviews, Summers proposes but does not prove several dark scenarios, including the destruction of records linking Marilyn with her last lover, Robert Kennedy. Ultimately, Goddess portrays a born victim, an essentially simple soul far out of her depth. Her psychiatrist tells it all in one sentence. The day of her death, Marilyn "expressed considerable dissatisfaction that here she was, the most beautiful woman in the world, and she did not have a date for Saturday night...
...India!" does far less well by the decorative arts. The occasional jeweled jade cup or fragment of ancient carpet does little to bespeak the Indian sense of design. Sculpture is scantily represented, although the first object the visitor sees is a ravishingly full-breasted, round-hipped bronze of the goddess Parvati. Thereafter, however, the erotic in Indian art is discreetly underplayed. Of India's greatest glories, its large-scale sculpture and monumental architecture, there is scarcely even a photographic hint. In all the exhibition, the only room that comes close to conveying a sense of the objects in context...