Word: claptrappings
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...classic part of Back to Methuselah, as a play, is the first part, a beautiful Shavian comedy of the Garden of Eden. The second part is second-rate drawing-room Shaw, and most of the rest is cerebral claptrap in settings of 2170 A.D., 3000 A.D. and 31,920 A.D. If the comic spirit were not alive in these scenes they would almost fall into the class of Wellsian monstrosity...
When an almost oppressively sophisticated writer turns out so highfalutin a play, there may well be method, even if there is no meaning, in his claptrap. Very possibly Cocteau meant to polish up a lot of passe heroics into a rococo extravaganza that would be lively theater to boot. And very possibly The Eagle Has Two Heads is full of brilliant rhetoric, in French. But on Broadway it is just a grimly gaudy bore. Nor, for all her fire and force, can Actress Bankhead act it the one way that might be effective-with high artifice, in the immensely grand...
...hours after Richard Wagner had finished Parsifal (the events had no bearing on each other, he whimsically explains). After recording this fact the author supplies six successive childhood memories, each followed by a digression in genealogy, i.e., the story of mankind. As achievements in gentle claptrap these sections are all too imitable, as were the sections of Van Loon's previous books which they imitate. Example: "[The ice age] was the period during which the human race went to school, for it was a question of invent or perish. And, as nobody likes to perish (the experience...
Revealing of the public's state of mind are the answers to the second group of questions. Republican voters declared themselves as having "had enough" of "frivolous agency spending," "controls, confusion, communism and claptrap," "Bungling at Washington, shortage, OPA etc." Some added the word, "Truman." These people wanted more of "economy in domestic spending," "honest and competent government," "more efficient organization of the reconversion program," "leadership." One woman polled put down "love," from which it is deducted she was interested intensely in peace in the broad one-world sense...
Most of the evening is devoted to conversation (a handful of good Hecht & MacArthur cracks, a hunk of fancy chatter about psychiatry and art) and to pianoplaying. Twelve-year-old Jacqueline Horner plays Chopin and Mozart with precocious skill; but the concert by no means makes up for the claptrap...