Word: banality
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...details of the starcrossed love affair, and the father of the family tries to burn them, to "protect my sister." But the sense and compassion of Elsa, who has suffered through the same type of romance that Alison had, saves the poems for the world. It's as banal as that. To make matters worse it has some totally unactable lines, such as one that one of the members of the family utters as he reads the new poems, Eben (low, and in beautiful excitement), "Why that bird sang thirty years ago--and sings now." Despite all this, Alison...
...show. The libretto, by Charleston-born Novelist DuBose Heyward, is full of the sort of amiable condescension toward the "darkies" that used to pass for progressiveness in the South. What really matters in the show is George Gershwin's music; some of it, particularly the recitative, is banal, but half a dozen tunes are as good as any Gershwin wrote, and Summertime will still be sung and loved a hundred years from...
Rather, it was necessary not to remain trapped in the banal concepts of space and time, nor yield to the morbidity of the objective position, nor yet to permit one's courage to be seduced by authoritarian devices for social control. It was imperative to transcend the seductions and qualities of materiel and its concomitant ethic. As for myself, I considered it necessary to evolve an instrument to aid in cutting through all such opiates, past and present, so that a direct, immediate, and truly free and human commitment could be achieved, and a responsible statement be made visible...
...interrupted with leisure so that future work be more efficient." To the Latino, "life is for leisure, interrupted occasionally with work so that leisure itself be possible." Latin American students in U.S. Roman Catholic universities, says Jesuit Weigel. are constantly complaining to him that Catholicism in the U.S. is "banal and too pedestrian. When a Latin American listens to a sermon, he wants to enjoy it with deep feeling ... I have seen Latin American boys who entered into almost ecstatic converse with Christ after Communion, though they skipped all parts of the Mass other than the Communion...
...Sartre that hell is other people; now he introduces the novel idea (for him) that heaven may be other people too. For this beaming Mr. Eliot, British critics had mostly middle-drawer adjectives-"entertaining," "touching," "his most human"-while the London Observer's Kenneth Tynan crashed through with "banal." U.S. audiences may have a chance to judge for themselves before long. The play is scheduled to move to London later this month, but at week's end Producer Henry Sherek was mulling "most flattering offers" to transport The Elder Statesman direct from Edinburgh to Broadway...