Word: banality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most compelling illusion in the show seems at first to be a big flat rectangle pasted to a white wall, dark gray in color with perhaps a greenish cast: undifferentiated, banal. But as you approach it, corners appear within its surface, as though reflecting the gallery in which you stand; perhaps this is a dark, smoky sheet of mirror? Not at all. "This" does not exist; it is nothing more than a hole in the wall, giving onto another room, which seems to be filled with a gray-green mist. The surprise of this dissolution of substance into absence...
Larson's inability to summon any emotion for Bundy's victimes is especially outrageous. The bodies just pile up. The first is no more tragic than the 20th because Larson gives no thought to the women--he just cranks out a banal notation of these girls' eye color, hair length, and extra-curricular activities. The reader can only conclude that Larson really didn't care that much. Women slain in Seattle blur with women bludgeoned, stripped, and abandoned in Salt Lake City, Aspen, and Tallahassee. As the stock descriptions accumulate we get only a sense of the growth...
...emblem of a presence too elusive or too vast to be enclosed in a box." The extreme examples of this were, perhaps, Cornell's cosmogonies-the "Soap Bubble Sets," made in the '40s and early '50s. The metaphor on which they rely is simple, even banal: a likeness between soap bubbles-quavering, iridescent, ephemeral-and the immutable orbits of the solar system, all things linked together by their ideal roundness. You cannot keep a soap bubble in a box, or fit the planets into one; but starting with two of the Dutch clay bubble pipes he acquired...
Thomson: Symphony No. 3 and Helps: Symphony No. 1--Virgil Thomson's undeservedly neglected third symphony written in 1932 is a relaxed, almost placid essay that demonstrates contemporary music need be neither bizarre nor banal. Thomson seems to be one of the few Americans who will shoulder his way into the concert hall repertoire, probably with this symphony...
However, what truly keeps The Elephant Man impoverished is its refusal to create flesh and blood characters. People are either saints or devils, no one has a duplicitious thought or action. As Victorian England was one of the most "layered" of all societies, this simply renders the story banal...