Word: catatonia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Once a year, Hollywood tries to kill off TV by driving all gogglebox viewers past he point where boredom becomes catatonia. This year's Oscar awards show succeeded dismally. It was the longest ever televised, and its entertainment value fell somewhere between Jackpot Bowling and the little white blip that appears in the center of the screen after the set has been turned off. Part of the torpor is by now hereditary. What was new was the annual Oscar awards' spectacular morbidity. The night dragged on as a kind of animated obituary, part Beverly Hills and part Forest...
...scale of values, everything's as good-and therefore as bad-as everything else." This dour viewpoint may be valid, as cocktail-hour philosophizing goes, but its polemical exposition in the first chapter damps the chemical process that produces satire. Burgess writes comically enough about TV-induced catatonia. the god-awfulness of roast mutton, and the entanglements of adultery, but the reader feels compelled to check each incident with the solemn preamble-is such and such really putrid or merely pathetic, is it cause or merely effect? Despite such shortcomings, the author's prose is graceful and precise...