Word: legendizing
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...Shriner with a water pistol? Something like that. Even writers have to get out of the house once in a while. The last time Updike cut loose abroad was about 15 years ago, when he used an African setting for The Coup. Now he retells the Tristan and Isolde legend as a love story about a black teenage mugger from the hillside slums of Rio and an upper-class white girl with a hunger for forbidden experience...
This is the kind of multilingual humor practiced by Vladimir Nabokov, except that he would have let the reader make the translation. Subtlety is not Updike's intention. Tristao and Isabel may be descended from ancient legend, but they owe much of their character to Monty Python and those old underground comic books in which Popeye and Olive Oyl assumed positions not found in the funny papers...
...South's decisive defeat at the battle of Gettysburg. Historians have debated whether his impressive victories throughout the war were due to his skill as military leader or his luck. And though he was the Army of Northern Virginia's top lieutenant, Longstreet failed to become a Civil War legend like his commander, Robert E. Lee, or his subordinates, Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart...
Wert explains that it is this unresolved controversy that has led to Longstreet's relative obscurity as a Civil War leader. His quite, but impressive service to the Confederacy became the basis for his failure to become a great Civil War legend. Stonewall Jackson's bold successes obscured his failures and his death shortly before Gettysburg left him an unblemished hero and martyr for the Confederacy. Robert E. Lee, the commander and gentleman who is generally considered one of history's greatest generals, gradually surpassed Jackson as the premier hero of the Old South. "The singular figure in the army...
...first question! As for the second: legend has it that Widener the Younger was aboard the Titanic when it went down, and that only his prodigious swimming ability gave him something with which to occupy himself as he grew weaker and weaker and ultimately drowned. In the aftermath of the disaster, a friend of the family was heard to remark, "If only Young Widener had been content to stay at home eating ice cream as I advised, this tragedy would never have come to pass...