Word: awkwardness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Nixon's resignation speech was dignified, it was also almost complacent and inadequate as his final official address to the people who had called him their President for 5½ years. His extemporaneous farewell to the members of his own Administration Friday morning, however, was merely awkward and embarrassing, a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of self-pity and self-torment (for excerpts from this extraordinary talk, see box page 68). Gone was the dry-eyed restraint night in its place was a tearful emotionalism...
...that some how failed to suggest the traces of a home town or a home region, blamed this phenomenon on California, often seen as a state of uprooted migrants and shallow or phony culture. That analysis was unfair to California. Whatever it was that made Nixon seem so oddly awkward and synthetic must be looked for in himself...
...collection has no evident criteria of choice, for the Vatican, faced with the awkward but basic question of what a "religious" work of art may be, has been unable to find an answer. Instead, it has accepted anything that seems, however dimly or perfunctorily, to contain a religious motif-even decorous little landscapes whose views include a belfry or a church fagade...
INEXPERIENCED acting and awkward staging account for the rough spots in the production. The English accents pronounced by some of the younger actors waver a bit indecisively before settling on region and dialect. Occasionally failing to pay attention to one another, the players time some of their remarks poorly. And though the audience surrounds the stage on only three sides with the bulk of the spectators in front of the stage, altogether too many of the characters' movements are directed to the back of the set, as if the play were being performed in the round. The actors often manage...
...subject matter is diverse, ranging from cripples and toads to sex and lobotomy. But the collection as a whole has no particular coherence, no central voice or theme which roots it all together. The poems remain solitary and unwieldy. Spivack's awkward effort ultimately fails due to a lack of cohesive, unifying philosophy. This book tries to fly inland to the "highways" of the mind. Unfortunately, it does all that and more--and succeeds beautifully at winging rapidly downhill...