The popular media has adopted the name Lolita to describe any sexually precocious young woman with a penchant for twisting older men around her finger. The original Lolita, however, was a more mythical creature, a "nymphet" (Nabokov coined the word especially for her), who at a mere 12 years of age c
Viewing the human condition as a "confused impurity," Pablo Neruda wrote what he called "impure poetry." His childhood in remote Temuco, Chile, was spent voraciously reading Spanish and French literature. The boy "hunted poems" in the mountains and forests nearby, and published several pieces in Te
Lisa Yuskavage likens the characters she paints to the elusive killers in David Cronenberg's "The Brood." Now, the woman at the center of "The Brood" is locked up in a mental hospital, and in order to "treat" herself, she creates characters who escape her confinement and kill all the people persecuti
The father of Impressionism was introduced by his first instructor, Eugene Boudin, a local Normandy artist, to the unusual practice of carrying paints and canvas into the open air. This experience of working directly from the observation of nature set the young Monet on a course he followed for th