Word: navel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...concerned with its own problems, more and more concerned with its economic difficulties, less and less in time with the U.S. It is ever more difficult to get Western Europe to look outside its own borders." He described Western Europe's attitude as "almost a contemplation of the navel...
Harvard yesterday announced the five winners of the Trestman and Sign Fellowships, which subsidize navel abroad for graduating seniors...
Stalking the French is nothing very new. Nineteenth-century geographers gave the sport its lore, and "nombrilism"--the notion that France was the navel of the world--tried to bring to the French people the order, place and nationality that history and circumstance had not. These days, though, such certainty is far off. In distinguishing the French fact from the myth, historians not only fear generalizations--the mark of any good culture-watcher--but fail to draw any conclusions whatsoever...
...busy striking attitudes to hit honest veins of emotion. His symbols sometimes multiplied like fruit flies and almost as mindlessly. His chief danger was the unhealthy narcissism of most modern art, whose tendency has been to gaze inward and contemplate the artist's ego, as well as his navel, to the point of myopia and hallucination. Almost inevitably, he suffered the attrition of dramatic power that afflicts most playwrights after...
...soon enough she's arguing with him about being treated like a wife. They're a couple before we know it, and they're dissolving before we see what kept them together. This is no doubt deliberate--a modern, detached paradigm of "bohemian" relationships, all that petty squabbling and navel-gazing. Only in the second half of the movie, when they have no scenes together, do we become emotionally involved in their relationship. The Soviets cancel Reed's travel plans, the Finns throw him in prison, and Bryant makes her long, surreptitious trek across snowy landscapes and gazes out longingly...