Word: elan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last Year's talented but indifferent squad has given way to a group of positive thinkers. Led by captain Harry Jergesen, the new outfit has the elan vital so notably absent in last year's team but lacks its experience and speed...
...tristitia mundi. Paul McCartney's sweet, detached, phantasmic voice begins, "I read the news today, oh boy,"--a strange, sad phrase which grows heavier as the song grows more hallucinatory. At first the news is about the Guiness heir, son of a Beer peer, dying in his Lotus elan, sad waste of youth, but comic in its utter meaningless. The singer turns on and the song turns more dreamlike, ushering forth a complex metaphor to rank with Dylan's best. "Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire/ And though the holes were rather small/ They had to count them all..."--this...
...Broadway drama called Life with the Family, and playing the toughest role of his career: being himself. Schultz believes that real eating-talking-sleeping life has all "the pathos, humor and drama of the theater." To prove it, three weeks ago he and his sons Lyle, 4, and Elan, 5, a jazz musician named Marzette, 28, and three dogs and a cat set up house on the stage of the Headquarters theater in Manhattan's East Village-and invited the public to drop in at any hour of the day or night (tickets...
...more famous loser stories concerns a Harvard student from Lichtenstein, who gambled away a semester's allowance in a night. Then he put his Lotus Elan and his title (he was a Baron) on the table--and lost them both. The winner returned the title and the Lotus in exchange for the use of the car the following weekend...
...past, Condon cultists have been treated to comic narrative leaps performed with the agility of a Macedonian goat, and to sly surrealistic glimpses into the lives of Oedipal wrecks and decent drudges who turn up naked at the Last Judgment. But in this book much of the elan is gone; it sometimes appears as if Condon is padding to keep from plotting. Besides, he seems to hold his nose in the presence of his desperate snob, and an author's distaste for his own hero can taint a reader's pleasure...