Word: merriments
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...contents-38 fictions-range back to Leo Tolstoy's The Three Hermits, whose pious innocents forget a prayer and run on top of the ocean to find their condescending teacher. The most recent are powerful condensations of modern life by Heinrich Boll, who describes a professional laugher producing merriment on cue for everyone but himself, and Paula Fox, whose News from the World describes a woman and her contaminated seaside village withering for lack of love. Between these terminals, Chekhov, Kafka, Mishima, Hemingway, Borges and a score of other master miniaturists show that brevity can be not merely...
There was at first a certain shivery merriment, a sense of shared rigor. "For a few hours," E.B. White once wrote of extreme cold's onset, "all life's dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive." But as the cold settled in, White's "clear and congenial task" proved too much for some of the frail and the elderly, for luckless travelers exposed for too long a time to the bite of winter. By week's end more than 230 people had died, victims of hypothermia (low body...
...line in that processional,/ Step into that small confessional,/ There the guy who's got religion'll/ Tell you if your sin's original." There was a time (circa 1955) when The Vatican Rag caused frissons and merriment all around the campus- circuit. Songwriter Tom Lehrer was a Harvard math professor who could do numbers on anything from sex to the Bomb. But satire is a parasitical art, no stronger than its host. Folk singers, the. military, Freud and faith, all have been familiar targets for over a generation. Today Tomfoolery, a chrestomathy of 28 Lehrer hits...
...star; Why weep you muse? What tales do you tell? Do give us your news 'fore the midnight bell. His brow furrowed deep, his countenance dour, The Christmas muse gave us a look more than sour. "I'll tell you my story of Christmas '81, And spare you the merriment, feasting and pun. Our journey begins in D.C.--Washington, (Where Santa brings coal more often than fun) The New Right announced all the bureaus were messed-up, And told the poor children: "For veggies, eat ketchup;" "But how," we asked, "did that hurt our Yuletide" "Where were the forces that...
Throughout the Middle Ages, Christmas continued to be a period of riot and debauchery, sometimes lasting several weeks. The French court in 1393 arranged a marriage between two court attendants as an excuse for prolonging the merriment. As described in William S. Walsh's Curiosities of Popular Customs, at the height of the ceremonies, the king and five nobles withdrew and, covering themselves with tar and hemp, re-emerged as dancing bears, tied together with a silken rope...