"Pretentious means making claims of great importance doesn't it?
These autobiographical essays, while brief, give a sharp picture of life on the edge of New York's literary world in the late twentieth century, from the sleep-around sixties ("You have the makings of a real little woman," Gallagher's analyst says, and leads her to his daybed) through the pretentious eighties (her boyfriend claims that he was Foucault's lover) and onward.
Poetry does not translate, and even though I speak Arabic it would be pretentious of me to claim that as I listen to recordings of Adonis reading his complex poems aloud, I can really understand the revolution that he inspired in traditional rhyme and meter.
I was previously unaware that there was such a thing as a pretentious chimp, a chimp who claims to be just learning language yet still uses words such as haruspices, popinjay, pinguid, pithecine, pellucid, opprobriously.
If you followed the news from Cannes... Which of course I didn't... You'd know there were boos at the press screening and claims that it's pretentious.
Pretentious though it sounds, you could claim to have designed it, if you had improvised, though not if you had followed a recipe, but would a "designed" meal be healthier and more enjoyable?
In 1880, a Washington Post reporter called terrapin vital to any dinner party "laying claim to being a pretentious affair".
Is the film really "hollow, empty, insincere [and] pretentious" as Sight & Sound's editor, Nick James claims?
It was all about the ease of fraud, including that practiced on an audience gullible enough to accept the worst accusations about China, especially if accompanied by claims of creativity just this side of pretentious.
While the film has gone on to be a cult classic, most die-hard fans are horrified at Kilmer's critical portrayal of Jim Morrison, claiming it showed him to be a pretentious, out-of-control sociopath.
