Word: earful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...When Britain's Lord High Chancellor explained the statute repeal bill to the House of Lords last month, the scene was characteristically somnolent, with at least five peers asleep on their scarlet benches and a couple of others halfheartedly straining to hear the proceedings with old-fashioned black ear trumpets. But when the Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, described the proposal as "a start towards getting rid of a lot of junk," his words rang like alarm bells. Leaping to his feet, Lord Leatherland cried: "I should hate historians of the future to say that Lord Gardiner...
...went last week at the premiere of Cage's latest musical production, Hpschd. Scored for one electronic harpsichord, six conventional harpsichords, eight movie projectors, 52 tape recorders and 64 slide projectors, Hpschd is an eye-and ear-boggling kinetic phantasmagoria that turned out, in one sense at least, to be Cage's most durable work - 41 hours durable, to be exact. As usual, his operating premise is that art is more of a manifestation of nature than an expression of man. This means, to Cage, that a work ideally should be as based on random chance...
...best the refined outpourings of private feeling. None of these excesses apply to Nabokov. Few writers have brought to the practice of art for art's sake?or indeed to thematic literature?the enormous talent and discipline, the overwhelming intellectual grasp, the scrupulously objective range of eye and ear that Nabokov commands...
...author's primary notice. He is not really replaced; instead, his crippled family is endlessly viewed and reviewed by its remaining members and a succession of friends. This inward turning is less absorbing than Novelist Calisher believes it to be. She listens with a tirelessly sensitive third ear for the psychological reverberations of the shooting, but there is little out of the ordinary to hear...
...rightfully a psychological novel, but a strayed social one. It moves repeatedly in that direction, and always the author drags it back. That is her privilege, of course. Still, it is true that a clear eye, which she certainly has, can sometimes be more valuable than a third ear...