Word: drearier
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fortunes declined at Cothen after Prince Leopold married an unmusical wife. In a monumental miscalculation, Bach accepted the post of choirmaster at Leipzig's St. Thomas Church. The salary and social status were lower, the living conditions drearier, and the duties more onerous. Besides being responsible for the music in two Leipzig churches, Bach had minor chores at two others, even had to teach catechism and act as proctor to choirboys. His family obligations were increasing too. After the death of Barbara, he had married a professional singer named Anna Magdalena Wilcken in 1721; she became stepmother...
...retrospect, his prose seems clotted, clumsy, pompous, prolix, humorless, flatulent and dull. An American Tragedy ran to 385,000 words ("250,000 of them unnecessary," snorted Mencken). Nevertheless, Dreiser's dogged honesty and ruthless candor opened the way for all the social realists of the '30s (many drearier than Dreiser) and also, in a way, for Hemingway and Faulkner, who quickly eclipsed...
...Arrests for plain public drunkenness total about 26,000 a year in San Francisco, 66,000 in Chicago, 80,000 in Los Angeles-while chronic drunks travel an endless circuit from gutter to cell to gutter before their final trip to the morgue. "It is hard to imagine a drearier example of the futile use of penal sanctions," says New York's Chief City Magistrate John M. Murtagh. In New York, at least, the courts demand proof of actual disorderly conduct and the police thus arrest only about 15,000 drunks a year...
...images of everyday life-a milk bottle, an advertising trademark, a scrap from a comic strip. These things are the same all over the nation; here indeed is expectable conformity. But upon closer scrutiny the Californians shared common aspects and a sort of group triumph: their stuff was even drearier than that of the Easterners. It might be labeled pop pop. The six: MELVIN RAMOS, 28, holder of an M.A. in art history from Sacramento State College, paints straightforward portraits of comic-book heroes and heroines. He professes a distinct liking for banality. "I'm a product...
...color photography is pretty, if you like the montage of dreary brown buildings with drearier green grass, and director Ronald Neame uses the camera with heavy-handed steadiness throughout the movie. One bad effect that sticks out from the rest is the effort to produce a symbolic snowfall at the end, to parallel Joyce's Dubliners. Neame had no snowstorm, however, so he had home-made snow dropped before his camera, resulting in the most phony look of the week. Scottish monomaniacs will like the incessant squirl of bagpipes, but most people tend to get very tired very quickly...