Word: lintel
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...shuttered, musty, little shop stood on the edge of the canal, next to the sumptuous guild of the moneylenders. On its lintel was the cryptic legend, "speak of nothing but business, and speak quickly. To the merchant-princes of the guild, who saw it in passing, it might have seemed like the humble bootleg of a cobbler. Not the most fortunate of them would know that within it countries of the mind were being discovered, vaster than the lands toward which another Italian was sailing in the same year. Entering, he would have found the flower of Venetian scholarship gathered...
...other than chairs and tables which may represent almost any architectural feature. The actor expresses himself in turn by speech singing, gymnastics and dancing. Fearsome, comic masks and face-painting, costumes, and a whole intricate play of gesture have complex, traditional significances (stooping, for instance, means passing under a lintel, i. e., entering another house). The singing is accompanied by one musician producing whining, squealing sounds on the Hu-ch'in (bamboo bow-and-string instrument), by others tapping wood blocks, striking cymbals, plunking rudimentary banjos. Their approaches to harmony are painful to western ears; their rhythms are often...