Word: elegiac
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...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...
...adangle, that rarely rises above a 5. Still, readers who can endure the rhetorical posturing -- New York police, at one point, become the "expected forces of the military- industrial complex" -- should find his account of the Chicago convention and trial fast paced and diverting. There is also a moving, elegiac coda in which Hayden revisits Mississippi with his ex-wife Casey and tours Port Huron, Mich., in search of the spot where the SDS was born...
...what we will about the Sixties' failures, limits, disasters, America's political and cultural space would probably not have opened up as much as it did without the movement's divine delirium." Gitlin's greatest achievement in this monumental book, perhaps, is that he is able to avoid the elegiac fatalism of the Ghost Dance in his analysis of the complex impact that this seemingly most self-contained, all or nothing of decades has had on contemporary society...