Word: stolidness
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Lilacs bloom listlessly in the dooryards, and the fluid play of baseball is again at hand. Shrill raucous crics of encouragement and derision shatter the cool air above Fenway Park, unruly urchins hurl dirty oranges and even dirtier epithets at their adversaries. Only the umpire's stolid face, inflexible as Procrustes' bed, retains its wintry imperturbaility...
Hofmann was born in Weissenburg, Bavaria, and his well-meaning father, a stolid civil servant, had hopes that the boy would one day be a famous scientist. Young Hofmann had the aptitude: he pored over engineering books, when scarcely out of school invented an electromagnetic comptometer. But at 18 he abandoned his tinkering to devote himself fulltime to art. He went to Paris, had a brief flirtation with the Fauves-the radical "wild beasts" who were moving away from objective naturalism-and with the cubists. The affair was "rather a platonic one," says he, for he was already preoccupied with...
...hero smiting his brow, discovering a new wrinkle in Fate's design. The Shakespearean moment, in the tragedies, is the restoration of order after individual or civil turmoil; in the comedies, it is the lover's mistaken identity. In Ibsen, it is self-doubt besetting the stolid bourgeois; in Strindberg, it is a shrill cry of female hysteria; in Shaw, it is paradoxical argument overturning a pose. Germany's late Bertolt Brecht, one of the 20th century's remarkable playwrights, has his own typical moment. In play after play, through changing locales, characters and moods...
...just been on a long vacation. In 1925 pudgy New Orleans Saxophonist Sidney Bechet gave Moscow its first jam session, so enthralled a young music student named Aleksandr Tsfasman that he quit Moscow Conservatory, formed his own combo, took to wearing green and maroon suits. Even the stolid Soviet government got into the act. It formed a 43-piece U.S.S.R. Jazz Band, released top Trumpeter Andrei Gorin from prison (his crime: insulting a Communist Party official), ordered him onto the bandstand. Then, as abruptly as it began, the jazz era died. The downbeater: Stalin, who ordered dzhaz outlawed...
...Support. In Léopoldville, stolid President Joseph Kasavubu and his new Premier Joseph Ileo picked up new support. Last week the U.N.'s Conciliation Commission, composed of eleven Afro-Asian countries that sent troops to the Congo, advised that Ileo might be able to bring peace with a broad-based government, and they recommended convening a "summit" meeting to bring the Congo's assorted factional leaders to agreement...