Word: 1880s
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...impossible to miss Irving's message, but his method of conveying it is ingenious in the extreme. The tale begins in the 1880s, when Wilbur Larch graduates from Bowdoin College in Maine. As a present his father buys the young man a night with a Portland prostitute. Larch gains from this experience a sense of shame, a case of gonorrhea and the conviction that he can do very nicely without any more sex in the future. During his years at Harvard Medical School, Larch develops a fondness for sniffing ether and a knowledge of the appalling problems that unwanted pregnancies...
...population had dwindled from 5,000 in the 1880s to 500 in the late 1960s, when political activists and dropouts looking for a Rocky Mountain high started moving in. Native Elvira Wunderlich, 70, remembers the hippies as "just a bunch of trust funders and freeloaders." But the newcomers brought along their political savvy and quickly commandeered the town council from the locals, known as the elks (because of their frequent meetings at the Elks Club). Says former Mayor Jerry Rosenfeld, 44, a Denver dropout from the Eugene McCarthy campaign: "We were going to build a utopia here...
...Idaho, skis and risk have always been a part of mail delivery. In the 1880s, carriers used 11-ft. skis to get over the high passes to reach the miners' camps. Three carriers died in avalanches. A fourth froze to death, his . bag jammed with Christmas mail. Arnold has crashed twice, once when the wind shifted wildly over a jury-rigged runway and put him into the trees. The second time, a crack developed in the exhaust system, carbon monoxide leaked into the cabin, and the pilot passed out. The plane's premature landing, fortunately, was again cushioned...
...that Polynesian art made virtually no impact on his painting; all its primitive elements-the flatness, the sinuous friezelike poses, the outlining-were either there already or deduced from photographs of Javanese, Cambodian and other Oriental material that he took with him. (One should not forget that in the 1880s, Frenchmen were still talking about Japanese art as art pri-mitif.) When he did quote Tahitian art, Gauguin played fast and loose with it, basing (in There Is the Marae, 1892) a Tahitian fence on the design of a tiny Marquesan earplug. In his Tahiti, primitivism was cousin to Baudelaire...
...From the 1880s onward, there was certainly no lack of African and Oceanic tribal art on public view. There was also plenty to be bought-though much of it, including some of the masks and figures that influenced Derain, Matisse and Picasso, was poor stuff made, even then, in Africa for the souvenir-and-curio market...