Word: banality
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...region in eastern India. After a brief stint at Delhi University, she came to Harvard, where she discovered "this foolish confidence that you can do anything." She also discovered her interest in film. Arriving in Cambridge, she intended to study theater but found the local acting scene backward and banal: "It was before Brustein was at the Loeb, and Oklahoma! was playing, endlessly. I just quit it and took a course in photography--which I loved, but not for my personality. It was too isolating, and I just loved to work with people. And that...propelled me into the next...
...only inspiring performance is given by Lily Tomlin as an aging and codependent waitress in a diner, and even her gritty spunk is ruined by the movie's banal pseudo-plot. Altman apparently interpreted Carver's point as something along the lines of: people lead day-to-day lives and experience moments of joy and moments of misery and are sometimes happy and sometimes sad. This might well have been Carver's point, in fact, but the film fails where the stories succeed because the latter are tinged with a feeling of bittersweet nostalgia that the former totally lacks. With...
...both Limbaugh and Stern make the circus-cum-marketplace of ideas quirkier, livelier, more bracing, more free, more American. Limbaugh, Greenfield rightly says, "highlights how overwhelmingly banal the normal public discourse is. You get ingots of predigested mush that pass for political debate, and here's Rush with some sparkle to him." One could argue that the Rialto is already plenty gross and strange enough without any help from Stern, but he does manage sometimes to turn the vulgar sublime. One could also argue that the ascendance of such meretricious infotainers suggests something less than flattering about America...
...Under the terms of the peace agreement signed by Israel and the P.L.O., Captain Abdel-Kader is one of hundreds of Palestinian soldiers training in Jordan and Egypt for police duty in soon-to- be-autonomous Jericho and the Gaza Strip. Lectures on courtroom law and fingerprinting may seem banal for men who until last month dreamed of military victory against Israel, but Abdel-Kader is ebullient. "Going to Palestine," he says, "is more exciting than jumping out of a plane for the first time...
...psittaceous repetition of this really rather uninspiring sentiment has gotten altogether out of hand, a testament to the built-in fecundity of the banal. There appeared on posters: "Life is Short: Play Women's Rugby," as well as "Life is Short: Pray Hard." One activity put it on posters without even bothering to make a "clever" adjustment--simply "Life is Short...Play Hard," followed by the organization's name. To the publicity directors of the offending organizations, here is a message in terms you will understand: "My fuse is short, don't try so hard." These posters only convince...