Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fragile world that seemed to have nothing more on its mind than fun and leisure. In favoring mythology, the fashionable Jean François de Troy still kept the mood. His Leda could be any comely marquise languishing in her bath. Everything about the painting-its heavy lushness, its torpor, its sybaritic atmosphere-suggests an overripe society about to go rotten...
Police brutality, which Parisians have just gotten around to protesting, is by now beside the point. If one re-reads the Sarte Beauvoir manifesto, it sounds curiously out of date. The question now is whether the police can rally from their torpor long enough to prevent chaos. (Ironically, at the same time that police impotence has made things easier for the OAS, the Organization's popular support is rumored to be falling off. It is partly for this reason that the hope of a future putsch has been abandoned, and the campaign of allout violence adopted...
Yesenin-Volpin's pessimism and rebelliousness come naturally. His father, the great Russian village poet, Sergei Yesenin, was an ardent early Bolshevik, whose increasing disillusion with Communism was accompanied by a marriage to Dancer Isadora Duncan and a slide into alcoholic and narcotic torpor. His bastard son, Aleksandr Sergeyevich, was the result of a liaison with a Russian writer-translator, Nadezhda Volpin. Shortly after his son's birth, Yesenin slashed his wrists in a Leningrad hotel, wrote his last poem in his blood, then hanged himself...
...electronic data processing make possible far tighter inventory controls, have helped customers to cut steel stockpiles from 20 million tons before 1956 to 10 million tons now. At the same time, steel is being pinched by the general leveling-off in hard goods (TIME, Sept. 8), and the torpor in major steel-using industries, e.g., oil, housing, railroads...
...began as just another week of heat and torpor in the Congo. Sweating natives, as usual, loaded palm kernels into boats at upcountry river stations, while understaffed United Nations teams passed out powdered milk to babies and urged the villagers to expand their scraggly little farm plots. In Leopoldville, things seemed normal enough: harassed Premier Cyrille Adoula, struggling to hold his limping central government together, still pondered ways to whip Katanga's Secessionist Moise Tshombe into line, and noted nervously that Eastern Province's Antoine Gizenga talked of breaking away again to win autonomy for his own ragtag...