Word: brief
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...program began with a welcome by Professor Thomas Kelly, in which he gave a brief history of the Vespers. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is believed to have composed this collection of works in thirteen parts for the Gonzaga family, the rulers of the duchy of Mantua, for whom he was court composer. The Vespers is one of the daily hours of Roman Catholic worship, and Monteverdi's Vespers contains the texts of all of the essential prayers: the opening versicle and response, five psalms to the Virgin Mary, the hymn, and the Magnificat. Interwoven in these works is a collection...
...coffees. In 1995 and '96 there would be a total of 103, several in a good week-- enough to produce mild caffeine overload and $27 million. But the really notable part of that memo was the warning by Lieberman that during two weeks of intense activity, "staff who routinely brief the President will be asked to be flexible during this period and accept that their briefings may be considerably truncated or eliminated...
...Chambers' story is larger and more interesting than just that event. For a brief, hilarious season early on, at Columbia University, he campaigned for the 1920 Republican vice-presidential nominee, Calvin Coolidge; but in the mid-'20s he pinballed leftward and joined the Communist Party, animated by an anguished convert's zeal. A melodramatically ernste Mensch (serious man), as he liked to say, Chambers began as a useful party "literate," hacking away as a foreign-news reporter for the dreary Daily Worker, contributing to the New Masses...
Anne Michaels takes some audacious risks in Fugitive Pieces (Knopf; 294 pages; $23), not the least of them being a brief introductory passage that reveals her novel's conclusion. "Poet Jakob Beer, who was also a translator of posthumous writing from the war, was struck and killed by a car in Athens in the spring of 1993, at age sixty. His wife had been standing with him on the sidewalk; she survived her husband by two days. They had no children...
...World name. But Niger, the river, is his origin, his blood flow, which Calvin Baker, 24, a writer for PEOPLE magazine, traces through generations to the brackish wash of present time. Naming the New World (St. Martin's Press; 118 pages; $18.95) is a writer's gamble, a brief, fast-changing swirl of prose sketches, prose-poetry, and poetry standing naked. Such a recitation--it could be chanted, to drum beats, in an evening--might dissipate in artiness. The view here is that it stands solid and speaks the author's mind...