Word: beasts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years before he died, St. Francis preached before a manger filled with hay, beside which stood an ox and an ass. Wrote an early biographer, Thomas of Celano: "Greccio was transformed almost into a second Bethlehem, and that wonderful night seemed like the fullest day to both man and beast for the joy they felt at the renewing of the mystery...
Schumann's Konzertstueck for four horns and orchestra, Op. 86, was another sort of problem, for while it was good to hear this interesting, energetic piece, it was plain that the supremely confident soloists required had not been found, the horn being a notoriously intractable beast. There was volume, but no dash, nor was the Orchestra able to warm to its part in the proceedings. Unhappily, the Brahms Tragic Overture also turned out in a pale, unsatisfying version. The opening was uncomfortably ponderous rather than massive, while the uncanny march towards the middle was revved up to a prosaic speed...
...stabs with tubes in mid-squeeze, a palette knife, his hands and, occasionally, a brush, grunting as he works. In a few hours, the picture is done: a wet, gaudy mass of color violently heaped and stirred. Sometimes it is a brutally simple likeness of man, woman, or beast; more often it resembles nothing at all. Typical Appels invariably shock the stuffy and are treated as sacred objects by the faithful, who call him the greatest Dutch artist since Van Gogh. An uncommitted man from Shqipni or Shush might view them simply as decoration of the most exuberant sort...
Lady Edith is feeling rather pipped, or she would shoot the python herself. From the reports of the villagers, it is a great, ropy beast-and it will creep forth to kill again after it recovers from a two-week digestive coma brought on by swallowing Lady Edith's cook. So Lady Edith, who runs an orphanage near Bihar, India, delegates the job of python stalking to a half-Indian, half-American Quaker youth named Peter Bruff. Though courageous, Peter is an abstracted, mystical young man. He is also a poet, and his work, a heroic poem about...
...taste for seeing things die." He still rambles off on safaris, photographing the big game and potting birds for dinner. (His barstool story is that his white hunter imitates a lovelorn female rhino, and when a nearsighted male rumbles toward the sound, Ruark hangs his hat on the beast's horn and the hunter slaps a Ritz Hotel sticker on its behind.) Ruark will spend the next few months "doing all of Africa" for the Scripps-Howard newspapers, because "I have a hunch that 99 million natives are going to make noise in the Union around Christmas...