Word: mai
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Young Charles Baudelaire set out to shock the middle class and, alas, succeeded. One hundred and ten years after his death the author of the first body of modern poetry, Les Fleurs du Mai, is customarily remembered as the original Bad Boy Artist...
...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...
...biography accurately describes Les Fleurs du Mai as an "anatomy of addiction"-of men and women hooked on drugs, alcohol and every variation of sex. Baudelaire himself drank to the brink of alcoholism and took 150 drops a day of laudanum-twice the dose fatal to a nonaddict. Yet the drug Baudelaire was most addicted to was hope: luxe, calme et volupté-the elegance of Islamic paradise, a Christian's heavenly peace and a pagan bliss of the senses. Baudelaire chanted of this blessed trinity while he suffered the diseases of the age: poverty, rage and soul-withering...
...alive are his incantations today? In 1857, the same year Flaubert was prosecuted for the alleged obscenity of Madame Bovary, Baudelaire was fined 300 francs for "offending public morality" with Les Fleurs du Mai. The theme of Flaubert's novel-the bored-to-adultery housewife-is the stuff soap operas are made of 120 years later. Today, Baudelaire's tragically ignored poems retain their original capacity to lacerate the skin of the mind...
...Fred Newhouse of the U.S. who watched helplessly as Juantorena burst past him in the last 20 meters. "He ain't God," said Newhouse, "but he's good." "He's what the future of running is going to be," said Mai Whitfield, gold medal winner in the 800 for the U.S. in 1948 and 1952. "He had no respect for nobody. He just went out there and started smoking...