Word: olympian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Probably not since the days of the ancient Greeks have so many exposed so much to so many. In one short week the naked dash has achieved Olympian, if not exactly Olympic proportions (see MODERN LIVING). Already those first lonely streakers across dark and isolated campuses seem the fusty pioneers of a misty age. The streaking contagion has spread to every corner of the U.S., spilled across to Europe, gingerly moved out ward in both directions on the age ladder, infected a still minority but growing number of women. What began as a tentative titter at the edge...
Think of Shelley, who died by drowning and whose heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by his fellow romantic, Trelawney. Or of Dylan Thomas, a sacrificial votary of drink (Olympian draughts, of course). Since the winter day in 1963 when Sylvia Plath turned on the gas and laid her head in her kitchen oven, she has become a goddess of the thanatophiliacs...
...Schlesinger has an Olympian gift for writing about the present as if it were history. Impeachment or not, he seems to take for granted that Richard Nixon's threat to the presidency is at an end. It is this possibly premature sense of post-Nixonian perspective that allows him to look back on the Viet Nam War as a blessing in disguise. Americans have long wondered whether the democratic consultations and the separation of powers required by the Constitution were compatible with modern world power. Since World War II, most of us (including Schlesinger, as he admits) concluded that...
What Bridges catches best is the peculiar tension of the classroom, the cool terror that can be instilled by an academic skilled in psychological warfare. His Ivy League Olympian is Kingsfield, a professor of contract law who passes along scholarship with finely tempered disdain. In an original bit of casting, Kingsfield is played by Veteran Theater and Film Producer John Houseman. It is a forbidding, superb performance, catching not only the coldness of such a man but the patrician crustiness that conceals deep and raging contempt...
...sonatas. It demands closer attention. But the fruits of attention are often sparse (in contrast to the Bach trios!). Beautiful themes are exposed, but then lapse into less-than-profound filler. Huge crescendi too often come from and lead to nowhere. Basically, Victorian music could not cope with the olympian symphonic medium. Although the time of the E-minor's composition, 1866, antedates Brahms and Dvorak, the Sullivan is valuable to us more as a well-crafted curiosity with touches of genius (particularly in the first movement...