Word: dulling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...dumb acceptance of the course system is a sort of dull marriage, then academic abandon (to use an overworked but apt image) can be a series of love affairs: liaisons with historical and literary figures, with movements past and present, with the seashore, with "great ideas," with cities (like Durrell), with mathematics and music.... At times, this process is seemingly unproductive, and prominent among the metaphors of academic abandon is "gestation"--an unseen but strongly felt growth. Like rebellion against the grade system, such metaphors can serve either as excuses for not working or, in the ideal case of academic...
...signifies, too, an impatience with using the future as an excuse for dull ritual or as a grim projection of personal disappointments. As an excuse, the future is often invoked to sanction a witless routine leading to rewards, honors, appointments--the joke being that "status" as a goal, like grades, is a confusion of sign for substance...
...target into focus, the pamphlet went on to say that "there is no known upper limit to human ability, and much of what people are capable of doing with their minds is probably unknown today." What is known is that "the rational powers of any person"-including the supposedly dull-"are developed gradually and continuously as and when he uses them successfully." Other points...
...dark, druidical pre-Christianity and the substitution of phallus worship for veneration of the Cross. Similarly. Miller in Cancer proposes a new world based on "the omphalos" (navel) as against an "abstract idea nailed to a cross." Despite the truly epic flow of obscene language, which becomes first dull and then comical, the book's real shock value is not moral but intellectual: what is baffling is not the sex but the snake oil it is cooked in. Cancer is not pornography in the usual sad style of that genre; it lacks the glum and oleaginous manner, the pseudoanthropological...
...growth, change--none of these exist in Viereck's dramatic world. And his ideas, bad as they are, do not develop from his characters and situations: rather, his play is a series of expositions of ideas, never embodied in dramatic form. The greatest sin in theatre is to be dull, and Viereck is rarely anything else...