Word: banality
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What's new is the theater of it. Television does not create weather, any more than it creates contemporary politics. However, the ritual ceremonies of televised weather have endowed a subject often previously banal with an amazing life as mass entertainment, nationwide interactive preoccupation and a kind of immense performance...
...lectures," "Professor Quigley's last original thought came in the 1950's" becomes "while students applaud Professor Quigley's mastery of the history of his field, they long for the inclusion of more contemporary perspectives." And so on. But though the world at large will see only the most banal digest of student opinion, the professors and TFs will see everything raw and unexpurgated: each receives copies of the forms exactly as they have been filled...
That reservation has made all the difference in his art. It is hard to imagine a less overtly political poet than Heaney, 56, or one who has more thoroughly purged his language of the commonplace and banal. "Poetry is more a threshold than a path," he once wrote. From his first published volume, Death of a Naturalist (1966), onward, he has produced intense, lyrical works that seem suspended between contradictions--life and death, joy and grief, memory and loss. His imagery is radical, in the true, etymological sense of that word: "The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch...
...fact, far from being simple and banal, the final monologue is turgid and confusing. The closing act abandons comedy altogether for a sentimental affirmation of life as something to cherish by mixing a heavy dose of Thoreau with Davis' own ardent declamations. The rather opaque passages from "Higher Laws," "Solitude" and other essays are further obscured by Davis' casual commentary scattered throughout. When finally he concludes that he is "everything God intended in man," he is everyone from Jesus to Ghandi to Ghengis Khan, the poetics ring hollow...
Director John Boorman, an artist-adventurer with an eye for pictorial rapture and social turmoil, brought this sort of scenario alive in The Emerald Forest. Not so here, where he lapses into banal visual stereotyping: the rebels are thin, winsome, saintly, while the nasty soldiers have bad skin and potbellies...