Word: blankly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...faced with the prospect of growing old in a society where the lines of experience inspire revulsion rather than respect in the young; where I see oldsters struggling to exist on inflated dollars they saved for a carefree retirement; where I see the blank and hopeless faces of wheel-chaired rows of idle pensioners in a nursing home; where I see old men fishing for carp at the city sewage outfall (the fish gather there to eat) because they can afford no other source of protein, early death by slow poison seems a delightful relief by comparison...
...spade," says a character in one of Christopher Fry's plays, "is never so merely a spade as the word spade would imply." At least not in Fry's plays. Fanciful and stylized, they are written in a verse that it hardly seems fair to call blank. Everything is cloaked in a brocade of metaphors. Was that a rooster's crow? No, it was "the pickaxe voice of a cock, beginning to break up the night." Did it rain? No, "the heavens emptied their pots." Fry uses such figures of speech-more figures than speech...
...Major, K 388, went well. It is in three movements, not a major work by any means, but an interesting idea. This work was accompanied by some silly program notes apologizing for it because, the writer says, compared to Beethoven "Mozart emerges as a trivial blank," when judged emotionally. I suppose program note writers have to make a living, just like everyone else...
First, a short radical-awareness test. Fill the blank spaces in the following statements...
...solution was to start with what he called a "void," a blank circle on a spacious canvas, building color and movement around it. Soon the void developed into a stripe, or as he preferred to call it, a "zip." The zip usually zipped straight down for eight feet or so through an unmodulated expanse of plain color. When the paintings were shown in 1950 at the Betty Parsons Gallery, reactions ranged from negative to outrage. "You're a threat to us all," exclaimed one artist. What followed were perhaps Newman's bleakest years...