Word: savants
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When asked to define the essential character of the Ayatullah Khomeini, a family friend recalls the scene at the drowning of Khomeini's infant daughter in Qum some 35 years ago. Khomeini's wife was tearing her hair in despair. When the friend arrived, the bearded savant was praying quietly over the body of the youngest of his six children. "I looked into his face and could see no trace of disturbance," says the friend today. "I knew he loved this child very deeply. Yet he showed no emotion, no sorrow, no excitement." After a while Khomeini said...
...look is a logical extension of the recent trend toward self-liberation in fashion. "People today are willing to be comfortable, both physically and socially," says David Tessler, owner of San Francisco's City Island Dry Goods Co. boutique. "They have no use for constraints or formality." Fashion Savant Geraldine Stutz, president of Manhattan's Henri Bendel, declares not only that "the wrinkle is the apogee of casual dressing" but also that it is "the ultimate declaration of independence, the last statement of revolt against fashion dictatorship...
Anxious to be on the right side of the bars, his readers joined the tirade. The newspaperman was elevated to social arbiter, literary critic and political savant. Even today, 22 years after his death, Mencken is remembered as the Sage of Baltimore, a pantheon figure in American letters. It is time for someone else to play the iconoclast. Charles Fecher, himself a Baltimore journalist, performs the task unwittingly in his amusing literary biography, Mencken: A Study of His Thought...
...menu-men are riding the wave of the so-called nouvelle cuisine, a form of culinary revisionism that has modified and simplified the classic, cholesterol-laden dishes of Caréme and Escoffier. It is not in fact all that nouvelle. Some 2,000 years ago, the Greek savant Arches-tratus inveighed against "sticky, clammy sauces." There is also cuisine minceur, the cooking of slimness. Michel Guérard, its chef-evangelist, has won a wider following for his ascetic unsauced dishes among dieters than among true gourmands, however...
Salinger's transition from prankster on the Potomac to savant on the Seine was a while in the making. After Kennedy was assassinated, Salinger lost election to a Senate seat from California; bounced around a few uncongenial executive suites in the U.S., England and France; and helped manage George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. After that debacle, he fled to France, jobless. Publisher Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber immediately hired him for L'Express in 1973, shortly before the Watergate story broke. Salinger's ability to make that long and intricate crisis comprehensible to a nation...