Word: banal
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...movies came out, a generation of Americans have made them an almost-religious touchstone, and in the last decade the Star Wars franchise has generated a canon of Star Wars trivia, coming in the form of trashy novels and pretentious "technical manuals." This new movie, then, comes as a banal realization of rumors that have been circulating for 20 years...
...EVENING NEWS Rating [3 1/2 missiles] Kudos to Dan Rather for being the first network anchor in Belgrade. It may not be Baghdad live, but Gunga Dan is in his element. Kudos also to whoever chose the tag Crisis over Kosovo over the banal Crisis in Kosovo. VIEWERS: 8.5 million...
...most entertaining sideshow of the war in Kosovo is staged almost every day at the Pentagon's press briefing room. There exasperated reporters conduct jousting sessions with uniformed military commanders in vain attempts to divine the most banal of battlefield data information. How many NATO air strikes have been aborted because of bad weather? "I'm afraid I can't get into that level of detail right off the top of my head," Vice Admiral Scott Fry said at a Pentagon briefing early in the campaign. How about an approximation? "I'd prefer not to even approximate it." A ballpark...
...account of the plan file is complete without a few critical suggestions. In order for the plan file to survive as a genre, it must continually reinvent itself both in terms of form and content. What makes for a successful plan file? The trick is either to be fascinatingly banal or else ambitiously epic. For example, keep a list of everything you've eaten, item by item, in the last week: "Two Snickers bars, eight cups of soup, one serving of baked scrod...".Update us on your nightly dreams. Transcribe your internal monologue in the most minute detail: "Itchy feeling...
Ultimately the novel fails because Codrescu's ideas are more banal than fantastic. Conspiracy theory, millennium madness, channeling of spirits: these are dated visions, and the date on the can has expired. Angels hovering above New Orleans, Albert Einstein reincarnated in the body of gigolo and pessimistic condemnations of consumer culture no longer have anything to offer us. Perhaps half a century from now a Hist & Lit concentrator writing a thesis on millennium madness will come across this novel as yet another example of kitsch ushering in the end of the world...