Word: elysian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...somewhere in the Far East, and travelling West, enjoyed moderate success with European varieties of elm. It was not until 1919, however, that Cerastomella really caught hold; beetles carried to this country on elm logs to be used for furniture veneer somehow escaped, and carried the fungus to the Elysian Fields of Unius americana. Travelling up the Connecticut River Valley into New England, and westward as far as the Mississippi, the beetle-fungus team has outrun its pursuers, cutting a determined swath which pathologists estimate will exterminate most of the genus in another ten or twenty years...
JEAN-BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT rode to fame in 19th century France on his ability to produce a vision of dappled Elysian fields populated by maids dancing under ever blue skies. But 20th century taste has preferred the pyrotechnics of the impressionists to Corot's blue and silver waltz. Beside figures painted in hot, expressionist colors, Corot's milk-white shepherds piping to their sheep were considered as unsatisfying as a diet of lily stems...
...cocktail aeon in the Elysian Fields, and the composers gathered at Calliope's. "Let whoever will make a nation's laws," said someone for the millionth time, "if I can make its songs." There was a silence. "Who makes Amer ica's songs these days?" asked Stephen Foster. George Gershwin removed his cigar. "No one you know," he said. "Or probably ever will." "It depends what you mean by the word song," observed Jerome Kern mildly...
...opera represents a courtroom trial in the afterworld, in which the newly dead Roman general Lucullus pleads his case for admission to the Elysian Fields. The libretto, originally written as a radio play in 1936, is by Germany's Red poet Bert (ThreePenny Opera) Brecht, but its only ideological message is antimili-tarism (the Communists condemned the text in 1951 as too "unpolitical"). In a stunning setting of blocks and planes, Lucullus faces a jury of five pale shades: courtesan, teacher, baker, farmer and fishwife. His character witnesses are stone-relief figures from the frieze that decorates his tomb...
...This Elysian union in time produced a son, Emile Tai, who grew up like the other native children. He never learned to read or write, took a native wife, settled himself as a vegetable dealer in the village of Punaauia, seven miles from Papeete. All that Gauguin's son knew of his father (who died in 1903) were vague stories told him by his mother. For almost 50 years, the outside world paid little attention to what had happened to Gauguin's native family...