Word: life
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...players had committed suicide. Aoki, 58, Takeshita's closest political aide for 30 years, slashed his wrist, neck and foot with a razor blade, then hanged himself with a necktie. As the man who had handled Takeshita's political finances, some newspaper commentators speculated, Aoki may have taken his life to shield the Prime Minister from possible criminal prosecution. But Aoki may simply have been following a long- standing Japanese tradition in which a servant accepts blame for his master's downfall by killing himself...
Rubbing noses in such gloom is only one of the demands Larkin makes on his readers. He also boasts (and sometimes complains) about his exclusion from * everyday life, his marginal role as a bachelor librarian, living alone and not growing mellow with age. In fact, Larkin makes of his infirmities a caricature, given to grim, plain speech: "Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./ Get out as early as you can,/ And don't have any kids yourself." This apparition even mocks literature. Admitting that his youthful joy in reading has paled, he advises...
Ultimately, the sense of conditional freedom illuminates all his best work, which is to say nearly everything in this book. Oddly enough, given his Oxford education and bookish life, Larkin was one of the century's greatest pastoral poets. "At Grass" (about retired racehorses) and "First Sight" (about winter-born lambs) are hymns to the inexorable rhythms of the seasons, to which each human, unfortunately, has only a short-term invitation. "Church Going" deals with a man-made structure. A wayward cyclist stops out of curiosity and enters an empty house of worship: "Once I am sure there's nothing...
...Karajan bravely declared, "As long as my arm can hold a baton I will remain, and as long as I live there will be no discussion about a successor." But last week the iron chancellor of the Berlin Philharmonic abruptly ended his distinguished 34-year tenure as conductor-for- life. With a curt, 17-line note to West Berlin's new culture minister Anke Martiny, the Salzburg-born Karajan, 81, severed his often troubled relationship with an orchestra widely regarded as the finest in the world. The reason given was ill health, but to an even greater extent Karajan...
...matter who gets the job in Berlin, Karajan's successor will almost certainly not be offered the life appointment that Karajan enjoyed, although the new man will be expected to maintain the Philharmonic's highly lucrative recording income -- another factor that favors Levine. The New York Philharmonic, for its part, has suffered under Mehta's indifferent performances and low appeal to record buyers. It needs a conductor with fire in the belly like Bernstein; if Billy Martin can be hired by the Yankees five times, can't Lenny come back once? Los Angeles, where the orchestra plays second fiddle...