Word: downrightness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...outsider observing Bicker finds it difficult to take the whole thing seriously. The enormous anxieties generated in every member of the sophomore class, the superficiality and downright silliness of its standards and ceremonies, the blatant injustices of the values and principles the system inculcates--all would seem ludicrous in any civilized community, but they are doubly comic when set in one of the nation's greatest universities and practiced by what is supposed to be a substantial segment of this generation's intellectual elite...
Patchen is a big boy now, 47 years old, and one's initial reaction is to remark that the fellow still hasn't grown up. His work is formless, often maudlin, sometimes downright silly. Yet amongst his poems (and he is, or has been, a very prolific writer) are flashes of humor and even insight that make leafing through this newest volume a not wholly unrewarding hour...
...River Kwai has acquired an undeserved reputation for "significance." The only way it could "mean" anything very important would be as a comment on various attitudes toward war or toward fine points of law and principle. But since the spokesman for one attitude is unspeakably stupid if not downright insane, the "issue" which the film discusses is no issue at all. We are expected to feel a grudging admiration for this Colonel Nicholson as he suffers, and makes his men suffer, for his little point of principle. However, anybody who hates the waste of pain and misery is likely...
Back to Buying. Knopf admits that the grievous inadequacy of authors, booksellers and critics does not excuse publishers for "producing the large volume of trivial, unimportant, inferior and downright unworthy stuff we do." He roasts his colleagues for handing out contracts to hopefuls who have never written novels and, worse still, for printing the results. Standards are so low, he complains, that no one "can say to any author, 'Your book is so bad that it can't be published,' because the author is just as likely as not to go down the street and sell...
Kerouac's use of pure Americana makes his language an effective vehicle at times. But it becomes merely amusing when he borrows from advertisements (A piece of apple pie is "nutritious, and ... delicious"), and elsewhere downright sickeningly romantic. ("Holy flowers floating in the dawn of Jazz America.") And when he tries to describe jazz, he reaches the heights of the ridiculous. ("ta-tup-EE-da-de-deraRup ...") It's difficult to see why, in the day of LP's, he thinks it necessary to compete with Charlie Parker on paper...