Word: elegiacally
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...MASON & DIXON (Henry Holt) Thomas Pynchon's vast novel retraces the progress of the men who drew the line between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. For all its Pynchonesque tomfooleries--a talking dog, a four-ton cheese--the tale is somber, elegiac. Mason and Dixon come to realize that their triumph means an end to the wilderness, the imposition of order on "the realm of the Sacred...
...different season, W.D. Snodgrass wrote a poem called "April Inventory," an ambling elegiac list consisting mostly of the things he had gladly failed at. His poem ends on the lines "There is a loveliness exists,/Preserves us, not for specialists." Specialists were the target of his complaint. The successful people around him had zeroed in on particular and limited interests and had been rewarded for the categories they had made of their lives, while he, in unsuccessful contrast, had flopped about and picked up a few scattered items of value, like loveliness...
Beginning with an elegiac, out-of-tempo introduction, the striking "Spiritual" becomes a mid-tempo, waltz-metered piece over a two-chord progression. Coltrane's bluesy soloing and Jones' ability to swing in spite of tempo contribute to the compelling mood of this composition...
...bravura display of cynicism not quite fully baked or fully earned. But the mood of Erik Fosnes Hansen's remarkable Psalm at Journey's End (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 371 pages; $24), published in its original Norwegian six years ago, when the author was 25, is dreamlike, elegiac stillness, a condition not usually thought of as youthful...
...Peters, whose choir-girl voice has a seductive hint of late nights and cigarettes, knows the tunesmith's secret: crafting a good love song. The catchy, uptempo Over Africa sees love as "a force of nature...the power of need." And the passionately elegiac When You Are Old is a declaration of eternal devotion: "When your brave tales have all been told/ I'll ask for them when you are old." In Peters' music every tale is brave, unique, beautiful...