Word: elysian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...calls his book, is a relief map of the Williams temperament. One particularly pertinent section concerns early traumas. The family move from Mississippi to St. Louis, when Tennessee was about eight years old, was devastating to the boy. In his mind, it became an expulsion from the Elysian fields to a dingy urban purgatory. He promptly contracted something diagnosed as diphtheria, which rendered him bedridden and turned his nature inward toward solitary fantasy. The resemblance to O'Neill's bout with TB is unmistakable...
Only once during the fight, for eight glorious seconds, did these Elysian hopes near fulfillment. Catching the 33-year-old Ali off balance, the 225-lb. Wepner sent a solid blow to the ribs that dumped the champ on his rump. Until then, a condescending Ali had dominated the contest in The Coliseum near Cleveland. Unusually heavy at 233%, Ali intentionally spent most of the first six rounds on the ropes, guarding his face and upper body from Wepner's pummeling and waiting for his opponent to wear down. Unable to penetrate Ali's defense, Wepner began...
...time and a place which seem to provide neither hope nor comfort. Blanche arrives for her summer's stay with her sister and her sister's husband by riding a streetcar named Desire, transfering to one called Cemeteries and getting off at Elysian Fields--directions which Blanche recites with some appreciation of their import and which put pretty well up front precisely what point in her life she has reached. Unable to accept implication in the death of her husband (she says deliberate cruelty is the one thing she cannot forgive and of which she has never been guilty...
...that achieves the repetitive impact of similarly sparse dialogue in Pinter and Beckett. Gielgud and Richardson are a beautifully complementary pair, the dandy and the tradesman, Gielgud's elevated clarinet tones v. Richardson's deeper bassoon. When Gielgud narrows his eyes he seems to be glimpsing the Elysian Fields; when Richardson widens his, he seems to be devouring a plate of sausages. Gielgud has a troubled introspective psyche; Richardson tries to rout his spooks with an anecdotal army of distant relatives. In sum, they create something more haunting than their individual parts. Just before Home's curtain...
...This elysian community actually exists. Its habitat is Africa's Kalahari Desert, a region so harsh and inhospitable that Western man would be hard put to eke out a living. But in that unforgiving neighborhood, the Bushmen, a golden-skinned, short-statured and cheerful people, have been living contentedly for thousands of years as hunter-gatherers subsisting on what nature provides without resort to agriculture. In Man the Hunter (Aldine Publishing Co., $6.95), a recent symposium of studies on primitive societies, Harvard Anthropologists Irven DeVore and Richard B. Lee note that "cultural Man has been on earth for some...