Word: dulling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Jules Romains' play is as tightly constructed as a Chinese puzzle, and just as wooden. He has even turned the sure-fire stage trick of Before and After into a dull science. We see a fresh-air mountain town transformed into a germ-crazy health spa. We watch a number of perfectly sound people subject themselves to two minutes of Dr.Knock's patter and turn into stretcher cases. But the one gimmick is pursued with such lethal, plodding logic that it nearly kills the play...
...expanded version of his 1956 book, The Listener's Musical Companion, shows that Haggin, at 66, is as snappish as ever.* "Accepted opinion finds greatness in every note set down on paper by a great composer like Bach or Mozart," he writes. "I hear in some works dull products of a routine exercise of expert craftsmanship. Accepted opinion holds some symphonies and concertos of Brahms to be works of tremendous profundity; I hear in them only the pretension to profundity." Tchaikovsky, Berlioz and Mussorgsky rank higher with Haggin than with most authorities. Puccini and Ravel he dismisses as perpetrators...
Hayes, a soft-spoken North Carolinian who started his career as an assistant editor for Pageant magazine, remained. He rose to managing editor in 1962, editor in 1963. He pacified the staff, tackled a perennial dull-cover problem by persuading Gingrich to try out George Lois, one of the adman inventors of the Volkswagen campaign. Lois, in real life a partner in the advertising firm of Papert, Koenig, Lois, Inc., gives away the $600 he gets for each cover to a Greek charity. Hayes also put across the idea that the magazine's editors should think up the table...
...outside, the pack or the lead, and there's nothing a trainer can do to change his protege's outlook on life. Times, left to the mercy of Swifty's attraction in a particular race, vary widely. And the dogs work out every day, so frequent racing doesn't dull their edge...
...national mood opposes moderation, history favors it. It does not vouchsafe us sharp, well-chiselled solutions. It gives us blurrer edges and dull lines. Whatever the ultimate bang or whimper, we can be sure that in between there will be only compromises. Let me begin with the terrible treatment that history has accorded our original justification for this conflict...