Word: banally
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...Bartlett stayed there, and having nothing else to do she drew the view from her window, over and over again-a total of nearly 200 studies of the pool, the boy, the gravel, the cypresses, the shadows. She drew on the spot, from photographs and later from memory; the banal content of the failed holiday slowly acquired a precision through being shuffled, isolated, winnowed. The final result is a group of eight large paintings in which the schematic dissection of the garden that Bartlett carried out in her drawings is rethought, the elements locked together in atmospheric and sinister grandeur...
...begin, "like a thing that goes inward for emotion, not responsively, because intellect is bad for what I do." Such thoughts always bring her to a helpless "Know what I mean?" And no one ever does. But when she sings, everyone knows exactly what she means; even with a banal song, she can hush a room as if she really had something worth saying...
...clever in the original Russian, flow steadily and unendingly through Limonov's rocky prose. These have been translated with a singular lack of inspiration into either "fuck" or "shit," and serve rather to dull one's sensibilities than to shock them. Likewise, Eddie's staggering feats of drinking become banal with repetition. Thankfully, vodka does not interfere with the lucidity of either his narration or his pain. Although he describes his own unhappiness and self-degradation with the same unsentimental gusto he might use on approaching a pot of hearty Russian cabbage soup, he never lets his explication of these...
...legend. Six years ago, he boasted to a Swiss interviewer that he had known 10,000 women, 8,000 of them prostitutes. He later revised his estimate to "tens of thousands." Moreover, he professed to see nothing extraordinary in it: "It's quite a normal number-even banal...
...apparent intrigue, the story is slow-moving and predictable at its best, simply tedious and dull at its worst. The characterization is vapid, and not just because the novel's richness is lost in the translation, Enchi restricts herself to describing the hair and skin color or the banal speculations of minor players in the story, ("Strong? Of course she is, but only on one level...") They seem to have no personality, no motivation for their actions, and only Yasuko, under her mother-in-law's spell, can be believable in such a state. The author fails miserably...