The mountain country looks vaguely like a cartoon Lebanon.
In the greatest of all his mythological paintings, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homer's Odyssey (1829) in the National Gallery, the ship representing intelligent, rational human aspiration sails away from the towering, formless mountains where the vague, shapeless giant Polyphemus rages in the clouds.
But for any plausible mountain, it will be vague and somewhat arbitrary what the boundary is between being a mountain-candidate and not being one.
Working mostly from memory rather than photographs, these urban locations are imaginary amalgamations of Los Angeles, Seoul, Tokyo, Toronto and New York, he says, and his mountain landscapes are nebulous, vaguely reminiscent of Death Valley and areas east of the Sierra Nevada.
But beyond the natural charms of the Poconos and some vaguely mountain-rustic notes, not much is the same.
Iban Mayo, the Basque climbing expert, was so jolted by the double outdoor torture chamber of paving blocks on Tuesday and the team time trial yesterday that he pronounced himself virtually out of contention before he ever saw topography vaguely resembling a mountain.
For example, most of you have no doubt heard about Jack Welch, a 7-year-old boy who tried to "shape" his Pop-Tart "into a mountain," and it ended up vaguely looking like a gun, and he got suspended for two days because what might have happened otherwise?
A French mare named Kracovie arrived for the race without her stablemate, Brigitte, either a mountain sheep or a goat — accounts were vague.
Bizet's oboe solo pierced the thin mountain air, focusing the English major's vague yearnings into a clear resolve to play the oboe.
He brings a tractor to his property -- the first on the mountain -- and its modern glamour, its vaguely menacing novelty, attracts Joseph Brennan to its owner.
