Word: formlessness
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Strange to U.S. ears are the songs Bela Bartok listens to. The 300 discs of love songs, recorded in wild, mountainous Herzegovina, have irregular, formless lines, queer vocal embellishments. Stranger still are the heroic songs, long, rambling tales of adventure and battle (the longest takes twelve hours to sing; many are several thousand lines long). They are chanted to a singsong type of melody, half speech, half music, whose short phrases are repeated with endless monotony. Under the voice runs a twanging countermelody, plucked out on the one-stringed gusla...
Aliens Entirely. But Ireland took its revenge on the alien Bowens. It was a revenge as formless and pervasive as a fog from the bogs. In their isolation the Bowens fell to fighting each other like spiders in a bottle. They fought about careers, buried treasure, inheritances, but mostly about the land. Tired of it all, Elizabeth's father deserted the land, from which the family had drawn its strength to survive. He became a city lawyer. Bowen's Court fell into disuse...
Steinbeck's paisanos were shiftless, harmless, simple, brawling, wine-bibbing Mexican mixed-breeds; M.G.M.'s are purebreds Spencer Tracy, Frank Morgan, John Garfield, et al. It is hard for them to be paisanos, but Victor Fleming's eloquent direction produces many a memorable sequence from the formless, wandering story. His characters never become quaint, and their activities are generally human and appealing...
Sixteen government agencies-for planning, building and financing houses-were heaped together in a formless pile. Somewhere under all this trash was a record of eight years of peacetime housing bungling, of a year and a half of defense housing bungling. Hundreds of thousands of badly needed houses were still being drafted or just being argued about...
...staggered waveringly into his room, his senses dead, his mind a buzzing, clattering chaos of emptiness. Somewhere ahead in the vague, formless distance a chair loomed up, sunk out of sight, bobbed up again, and finally disappeared. As he was subconsciously wondering where it had gone, the Vagabond felt something hard and unyielding below him; looking down, he made out the dim outlines of the chair, its arms surrounding him familiarly. That's where it is, his mind said to itself automatically, and as the walls bowed and nodded and pirrouetted their assent, Vag tried to pull himself together...