Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...spotty. All too often his narrative poems, dealing with such subjects as a tailor's affair with a vampire and a Roman emperor's gloating over the dissection of an Eastern princess, seem more ridiculous than horrible. And his reflective poems frequently sink into a mindless musical torpor, in which occasional brilliant passages are overwhelmed by loose, undisciplined globs of language...
...grew up in Peking, where his peasant-born father was director of military training for the Imperial Chinese army. In Peking's yellow-roofed Forbidden City, Dowager Empress Tzu-hsi (also known as the "Venerable Buddha") still occupied the Dragon Throne, and China still lay in the heavy torpor of her past. While Wu was in school, Sun Yat-sen and his followers rudely yanked at the queue of Chinese tradition, dethroned the Manchus and established the Chinese Republic...
...Town. Where are the people? In 1950, it seems that the U.S. wants to live, not in a big city, but near it. All over the nation, people fleeing the city's crowds and taxes, people fleeing the country's torpor and low wages, have settled in the suburbs. The growing town of 1950 is the bedroom town...
With preliminary grunts, tentative shouts and nervous harumphs, the nation's politicos shook off the winter's torpor. Most active were those in the South, where the Democratic primaries are the only elections worth winning. But everywhere last week, there were twitchings in the body politic...
Though Surinam's mines provide U.S. aluminum makers with two-thirds of their bauxite, they are so mechanized that fewer than 3,000 natives work in them. For the most part, Surinamers live in stagnant torpor, surrounded by jungle, mangrove swamps, umbrella ants, red howlers, web-footed dogs, and water pigs. Most of the people suffer variously from malaria, fllariasis, dysentery or leprosy...