Word: banalities
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...last piece of fiction, "The Sentimental Journey of Arthur Friedberg," is simply clumsy and banal. David Ansen blows a paragraph of dull theme into several pages of dull plot...
...unfortunate incident. Carl Jung warned against abandoning the traditional view of death "as the fulfillment of life's meaning and its goal in the truest sense, instead of a mere meaningless cessation." Psychologist Rollo May feels that the repression of death "is what makes modern life banal, empty and vapid. We run away from death by making a cult of automatic progress, or by making it impersonal. Many people think they are facing death when they are really sidestepping it with the old eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-you-die-middle-aged men and women who want...
...today's literature there are few "great deaths." Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Conrad gave death a tragic dimension. Hemingway was among the last to try; his heroes died stoically, with style, like matadors. Nowadays, death tends to be presented as a banal accident in an indifferent universe. Much of the Theater of the Absurd ridicules both death and modern man's inability to cope with it. In lonesco's Amedee, or How to Get Rid of It, the plot concerns a corpse that grows and grows until it floats away in the shape of a balloon-a balloon...
...Roman, Epicurean, supercilious," sighs the publisher's preface. "The Jet Set is passé. Today you have the Restless Set, those people who are bored with the banal." So saying, Editor-Publisher Igor Cassini, 50, bored and restless ever since 1964 when he was fined $10,000 as an unregistered agent for Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo, launched his new magazine Status. It had pieces by Lucius Beebe and Cleveland Amory, who go all the way back to Café Society, and some instructions on giving yourself the "Go-Go-ciety look" ("float about carefree in tiny doll dresses...
...warmer there." It would be sizzling, as a matter of fact, wherever Dame Edith happened to be. For almost half a century she spat fire and spouted verses that perceptibly elevated the social and intellectual temperature of her times. In this autobiography, a thing of brilliant shreds and banal patches, Dame Edith throws a harsh new light on the life of the poet and the genesis of the eccentric. And incidentally applies to her contemporaries a number of nifty posthumous hotfoots...