Word: fin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gladstonian vocabulary, reserving for his strongest expletives such terms as "Oh perdition!" and "Balderdash!" He spurns television, the telephone, central heating, refrigeration, indoor plumbing and all literature published hi the past 60 years. Thoroughly true to his lifestyle, he supports himself by repairing player pianos, Victrolas, nickelodeons, and other fin de siecle artifacts, drawing customers from all over the state...
From the very beginning, the appeal of the fin was irresistible. The very word angling derives from the ancient Greek onkos, or barbed hook. Circa 200 B.C., Cato the Elder (manifestly a non-angler) was astonished by tales of "a city where fish sold for more than an ox." (To the fisherman, the situation is unsurprising; acquiring the fish called for more ingenuity, greater effort and less tenderizer.) History's most prominent fisherman was, of course, St. Peter, who later turned to netting souls. In the years A.D., angling was seen as something more than the mere coaxing...
Unfortunately, my third customer that night cheated me by insisting that the one-dollar bill he gave me was a fin. I surrendered the $4.65 without complaint. Undaunted, I departed the right-field bleachers and headed for the more competitive areas, the expensive first and third baseline seats...
...people would have the real world play." Both were fascinated by dream and ambiguity, the duality of sex and death, perversity and contradiction and mystery. This show makes one realize that surrealism was no revolution but a final knotting-up of the 19th century romantic tradition, whose decadent or fin-de-siècle form was symbolism...
Fictive Avatars. The phrase fin-de-siècle has long stood for a filleted sort of consciousness: the epicine, misty, dandified transcendentalism and café demonolatry whose sturdier ancestors were men like Baudelaire and Poe. There is a certain truth to this, as evidenced by a work like Jean Delville's Orpheus. A member of the symbolist circle, Delville (1867-1953) was a devoted admirer of Joséphin Péladan, leader of the Rosicrucians in France. Yet it probably does not help us much now to know that the sickly greenish-blue radiance in which Orpheus...