Word: peacocking
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From the West Flowery Gate to the Well of the Pearl Concubine, the Forbidden City is crammed with a sequence of halls, austere courtyards, and a garland of delicate gardens. Here emperors strutted on stiltlike shoes, empresses basked under peacock fans, concubines lustered their hair with elephant dung, and eunuchs plotted palace intrigues...
...central mountains north of Saigon, Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, solemn and immaculate in a white sharkskin suit, sat on a canopied dais before representatives of 600,000 mountain tribesmen. Huge brass gongs sounded out a tribal chant. Tribesmen, some wearing only loincloths, others rigged out in bright robes and peacock feathers placed ceremonial jars of wine from each mountain village before him. Through long, curved bamboo stems, Diem took a ceremonial draught from each jar. Then village elders slipped three large gold bracelets on Diem's arm, spread the head and entrails of two sacrificed water buffaloes before...
Griffes: Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan (Eastman-Rochester Symphony conducted by Howard Hanson; Mercury). Gifted U.S. Composer Charles T. Griffes (1884-1920) here gets the first LP of his biggest orchestral effusion. Like his better-known White Peacock (also on this record), it proves him to be the American Delius; the style falls somewhere between French impressionism and German tone poems...
Convincingness, the sine qua non of illustration, led even Mobile-Maker Alexander Calder to resort to the recognizable for his illustrations of a recent edition of Aesop's Fables. Calder's depiction of a vain crow being adorned with peacock feathers by his feathered friends has more wit than force, and looks more like a bent-wire construction than a drawing, but any child can grasp it and enjoy...
Edith was only five when she attempted to run away from home, but returned because she couldn't lace her boots. At Renishaw, the Sitwell country house in Derbyshire, the child's first friend was a peacock which used to wait for her each morning. "I would go to the garden and we would walk, you might say, arm in arm. When asked why I loved him so, I answered, 'Because he's beautiful, and be cause he wears a crown!' " That idyll ended when father Sitwell bought the peacock a wife. "From that moment...