Word: post-world
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...reason for the zither dither: the catchy, twangy background music that British Cinema Director Carol Reed (Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol) had worked into his new smash hit, The Third Man. The picture demanded music appropriate to post-World War II Vienna, but Director Reed had made up his mind to avoid schmalzy, heavily orchestrated waltzes. In Vienna one night Reed listened to a wine-garden zitherist named Anton Karas, was fascinated by the jangling melancholy of his music...
...pronouncement means that dignified Poet Eliot is going to settle down to a donnish little tussle with Noah Webster had better brace himself for a shock. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture Eliot advances a view of present-day western civilization that is as pessimistic as his famed post-World War I opus, The Waste Land. What's in a Word? U.S.-born T.S. Eliot migrated to England in 1914, and quickly became what he is today, the English-speaking world's most distinguished poet and literary critic, one of England's most conservative conservatives...
...week's end, the flu (and the hangovers) were still far from under control. Sneezing, snorting Frenchmen speculated about where the flu came from. "I think," said one housewife, "it is an experiment in Russian bacteriological warfare." Others recalled that the post-World War I flu, which supposedly started in Spain, had been known accordingly as the Spanish flu. This one, Frenchmen were sure, had crossed over from Italy. They promptly called it la grippe Italienne. With an acerbity that boded ill for European unity, Italians in Paris retorted by calling it influenza Francese...
...stock of $50 flannel suits, and bragged in full-page ads that it was "shooting the works for $19.95." Retailers remembered their old maxim: sales of men's clothes are the first to fall; then women's, and then children's. They also remembered that the post-World War I slump began with a drastic retail price cut (John Wanamaker...
Collages did not last as long as ordinary painted pictures, and their very impermanence was bound to appeal to George Grosz and other German Dadaists (who pretended to despise art) of post-World War I. One Grosz number: a brutish-looking portrait with a cut-out of a mechanical pump where the heart should be. Max Ernst (who has since gravitated logically to surrealism) attached a lady's legs to a bit of lace, pasted both on a cloudy sky and called his faintly sinister porridge Above the Clouds Walks the Midnight...