Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Osborne's anti-hero is Bill Maitland, a London solicitor hung up on booze, barbiturates and the bleak self-knowledge that he is "irredeemably mediocre." He is pushing 40, a tooth-shy, flea-bitten leopard, all spots and no strength, restlessly, frantically, pacing the cage of his life-in-death. "In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost," wrote Dante; Inadmissible Evidence is, among other things, a threnody on the middle years, laced with caustic humor...
LENINGRAD by Nigel Gosling. 252 pages. Dutton. $25. Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg, lies on the bleak landscape of Communist Russia like an ornate brooch, a city unexpectedly and astonishingly brilliant with its canals and palaces and blue-and-white cathedrals and marble statues and gilded domes glinting in the wintry sun. Author Gosling, art critic of London's Observer, and Photographer Colin Jones have successfully limned the luminous city built by that savage giant, Peter the Great (1672-1725), along the soggy shores of the Neva. It became the seat of the czars and of Russian culture; Pushkin...
GREAT TAPESTRIES, edited by Joseph Jobe. 278 pages. Edita, S.A. $22.50. In medieval times, tapestries were functional: they hid the bleak stone expanses of chateau walls, and their woolen thickness helped keep out the cold. But utility can lead to art, and the art of weaving came to its finest flower in the textured murals that are sumptuously spread through these pages with such fidelity that the beholder wants to touch them. The book's first three sections explore the history of tapestry weaving, a history still being written by those-among them...
...Legion still holds firmly to morality in movies. Whereas it used to work with bleak negativism, banning whole movies for a couple of suggestive scenes, it now tries to operate critically, recognizing that morally good movies can be made about sinful topics, and in many cases merely arming the viewer to perceive a movie's moral lapses for himself. The assumptions of the change are that the intellectuality quotient of U.S. Roman Catholics has substantially risen and that cinema has sharply improved...
...Advocate has quite a bit to be neurotic about. The November number is scrawny and bleak. It has twenty-eight straight pages of existential lamentations, with ads for variety. No doubt, as the Advocate claims, "the best 'young' writing being done in the community will stand comparison with the work of the more nearly established"; but it's a sorry thing that the magazine has to depend so much on the "community." The current number boasts only three writers from Harvard or the 'Cliffe. The Advocate will continue to lean on post-B.A. literati as long as undergraduates...