Word: elegiac
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...possible to be entranced by photography and at the same time disquieted by its powerful capacity to bypass thought. Photography, as the critic Susan Sontag has pointed out, is an elegiac, nostalgic phenomenon. No one photographs the future. The instants that the photographer freezes are ever the past, ever receding. They have about them the brilliance or instancy of their moment but also the cello sound of loss that life makes when going irrecoverably away and lodging at last in the dreamworks...
Howe has always had an ear for plausible conversation and a keen eye for the elegiac beauty of the everyday. Blending them with the subtly magical in Approaching Zanzibar at last relieves her work of a seeming pettiness and dullness. In the production that opened off-Broadway last week, she is aided by a superb cast, including Jane Alexander and Harris Yulin as the parents and Bethel Leslie as the dying aunt -- all established stars who delicately avoid star turns -- and the exceptional Clayton Barclay Jones and Angela Goethals as the children. Heidi Landesman's brilliantly simple sets fill...
...this was exactly what gave pastoral its modern quality. Modernism resisted clear narrative. It wanted to evoke mood and sensation. And in its early years at least, it was drawn to the discreet presence, strung along the shores of the Mediterranean, of an elegiac classical past. The figures in Matisse's fauve landscapes at St.-Tropez -- amply represented in this show -- are Arcadians with spots. The pale recumbent nude among the columnar tree trunks in his Nymph in the Forest, 1935-42 or '43, harks directly back to Titian. The flute player in Henri Rousseau's The Happy Quartet...
...suave young man in a red tie and gray pinstripe suit is seen walking through a grove of trees outside Moscow's Ostankino television center. Vladimir Molchanov, 37, host of the late-night television show Before and After Midnight, is opening his monthly broadcast with an elegiac monologue on the passing of summer. By the time Molchanov has entered the studio, oak branch in hand, Soviet viewers have been treated to brisk, taped reports on an Australian stork breeder, a Japanese horseback-riding robot and the world's largest egg. The 90-minute show also features videos from rock stars...
...about this book seems unwarranted. It is fascinating to watch a major writer re-examine his life, trying to extricate reality from the tales it later inspired. Sometimes, as he has so often pointed out, the gap between the two proves enormous. Roth describes his Newark childhood in warm, elegiac terms that completely invert the cramped, maddening domesticity endured by Alexander Portnoy: "Our lower- middle-class neighborhood of houses and shops -- a few square miles of tree-lined streets at the corner of the city bordering on residential Hillside and semi-industrial Irvington -- was as safe and peaceful a haven...