Word: bestirs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Midlands. I did twenty-four plays in twenty-four weeks, including O'Neill and Shakespeare." (Imagine a repertory company doing a play a week, including O'Neill and Shakespeare, in, say, a middle-sized city in Pennsylvania. Even a city the size of Boston seems hardly willing to bestir itself to support a repertory theatre.) He That Plays the King, his book on the drama, came out in 1951; it includes material written at Oxford and while directing in Staffordshire...
...Solemn Moment. By now around the world, great leagues of newsprint sought to bestir readers with a picture of the great events, painted in shades ranging from the jaded blue notes of burlesque to the cloying clichés of a Victorian novelette. London's Daily Express front-paged the news that the American radio sponsor for the wedding broadcast was the Peter Pan brassière company. Saloon-Gossipist Earl Wilson informed his readers that "Rainier and Grace were real smoochy at the party for bridesmaids." Other reporters, sending out breathless bulletins, had a hard time agreeing...
...vision and a different art. If no more wise than Chekhov, he is more wordly-wise and more ironic. Much of A Month is leisure-class social comedy, in which sheer ennui acts as a stimulant and the yawn is father to the kiss. Where Chekhov's people bestir themselves too little or too late, Turgenev's seem overready; just because the landscape is flat or the drawing room tedious, they grasp at situations and embroider them, they self-centeredly turn dramatist themselves. But they are often worldly enough to be on to what they are doing...
...principle of paper-writing is certainly recognised in the lower-level General Education courses, which in their attempt to bestir sluggard minds, usually require at least four papers apiece. Instructors of departmental and upper-level General Education courses, however, often require no more than an hour exam. Hour exams do serve to test one's mental agility. And they make a good game, in which one sees how well he can furnish a blue-book from the warehouse of a vacant mind. Even if one does know the material, hour exams permit little time for serious deliberation of a question...
...courses could be distributed, and interdepartmental committees would be enabled to accomplish something beneficial, if not striking. Although no one expects the great morass of courses ever to develop any coherent form, improvements can be made if the faculty will only consider a more logical curriculum important enough to bestir itself...