Word: legendes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What a brilliant subject for a Fellini movie-and what a disappointing treatment of it. Seducer, charlatan, scribbler, dabbler in black magic, Giacomo Casanova was that most magnetic of figures, the legend with nothing lofty about him. Born in a glittering Venice that was rife with disease and intrigue, he was equally at home in scenes of Watteau-like elegance or Hogarthian stench. He roamed the capitals of Europe, living by his wits, his nerve and a nice instinct for when to get out of town. He dreamed up mining schemes and lotteries, supported himself at the card table, survived...
Fish will need all the perfection he can get to fill the shoes of Jack Barnaby, the coaching legend who retired last year with a long list of national squash championships and Ivy tennis titles to his credit...
...hand-tinted legend has displaced the coruscating verse-a fault, says this terse, canny biography, of the poet himself. According to Alex de Jonge, a Fellow and Tutor of New College, Oxford, Les Fleurs du Mai is "Pilgrim 's Progress in reverse," and so was Baudelaire's life...
Those lines are a prophetic summary of the modern temper; small wonder that Wallace Stevens wrote of Baudelaire, "His stanzas hang like hives in hell." It is to be hoped that Alex de Jonge's book will help to dispel the poet's legend and resurrect his verse for a wider audience. But that hope, too, may be a drug. In which case, Baudelaire still wins, screaming over the gulf of a century: "Hypocrite lecteur-mon semblable -mon frère!" (Hypocrite reader-my double-my brother!). Melvin Maddocks
From birth, Chogyam Trungpa Tulku was destined for great things. The son of poor nomads, he was born in a yak-skin tent near Pago-Punsum, one of the holiest mountains in Tibet. When he appeared, according to legend, pails of water turned to milk and a rainbow spread across the sky. The infant was declared to be the reincarnation of the tenth Trungpa Tulku, a supreme abbot of one of Tibet's strongest Buddhist sects. A royal coronation, attended by 13,000 monks, followed soon after, and the boy was raised to rule nearly a thousand square miles...