Word: detritus
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...Shavian sublime and the G.B.S. ridiculous are both visible in the two latest products of the Shaw scholastic industry. Dr. Stanley Weintraub, a leading Shavian expert in the U.S., has culled biographical bits from the detritus of Shaw's mountainous writings to make a paste-and-scissors "autobiography." British Historian R. J. Minney has formed a pattern of sorts from some industriously gathered anecdotal bits. Though the Shavian shavings do not quite add up to the beard of the prophet, Weintraub's book at least proves that Shaw was perhaps the greatest autobiographer who never wrote...
...Full Fathom Five is not the largest or most significant Pollock at the current exhibition, but it has a special fascination, for it contains in embryo the later paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Its panorama of steely swirls is underlaid with nails, cigarettes, tacks, buttons and other detritus-yet all made lovely, as it were, by lying drowned at the bottom of a sea of paint, vividly evocative of Ariel's song in The Tempest...
...inherits a 1912 Corona typewriter or an Atwater-Kent radio in plywood Gothic style. They are also lucky who have-squirreled away somewhere-cast-iron toys, lead molds, bubble-gum machines, wind-up phonographs, toy steam engines, pieces of farm machinery, embossed advertisements-in fact, any of the detritus of industrialism. It is wanted...
Subject to Suppression. Pushkin's strange shape and nature were the products of a bizarre lineage. On his mother's side, he was great-grandson of an African slave originally presented to Czar Peter the Great. His father's family, as he put it, was "the detritus of a decrepit aristocracy" that went back 600 years into feudal times. Born in 1799 in Moscow, Pushkin was left largely on his own by indifferent parents. As a boy he was impressed by French liter ature, especially the savage wit of Voltaire, and absorbed Russian folklore from his peasant...
When Richard Henry Dana wrote these observations in his diary at Christmastime, 1835, San Francisco Bay was 700 square miles of pristine majesty. In the years since, the building of the "place of great importance" has exacted its toll. Piers, salt ponds, rotting ship hulks, human detritus and a land-hungry urban complex have reduced that water area to 420 square miles. This week forces were mobilizing in San Francisco to end the shrinkage...