Word: formlessness
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...less ambitious but a good deal less sharply defined: the relation of the feminist movement, the War and changing social standards to "the private destinies of individuals." The result is another of those curious hybrid volumes that have recently become numerous in English writing-a long (601 pages), formless book, half-tract and half-fiction, slightly radical, a little scandalous by pre-War standards, not quite a sentimental story, somewhat highbrow, almost good...
...homesick, 18-year-old poet at the University of Berlin sent his sweetheart in his home town three exercise books filled with bad verse, which he soon afterward denounced as "all flat and formless in feeling; nothing natural about them; everything up in the air." The poet was Karl Heinrich Marx, stocky, dark-haired, active son of a well-to-do Jewish lawyer from the Rhineland town of Trier. His 22-year-old sweetheart was Jenny von Westphalen, close friend of his older sister, daughter of a highly-placed official whose family had won its title for military service...
Since If Memory Serves is a formless book, with Sacha Guitry's imagination ricocheting from one pleasant memory to the next, omissions are less important than they would be in a straight autobiography. But the references to Yvonne Printemps, his wife and co-star from 1919 to 1932, are surprisingly sparse, limited to a passing remark that Sarah Bernhardt witnessed their wedding and a brief account of their U. S. triumph. He says nothing of their divorce last year, of his triumph with his new leading lady-lovely, dark-haired Jacqueline Delubac, now the third Madame Sacha Guitry...
...Brien called attention to the work that was then appearing in little literary magazines, boldly declared that the best short stories were being written by writers that few people had ever heard of. He reprinted the early work of Waldo Frank and Ruth Suckow, seemed particularly to favor episodic, formless sketches, especially those of the Midwest. Since he has always eagerly welcomed new talents, U. S. writers, who as contributors receive prestige but no royalties from Editor O'Brien's collections, generally consider his labors of value, disregard his critical writings in which faint, almost imperceptible developments...
...possible but always at the expense of a little greater disorganization. In such wise the total energy must go on being shuffled until no further shuffling is possible and its distribution is completely chaotic. Then the Universe will be a "uniform featureless mass in thermodynamic equilibrium"-a warmish, formless soup of aimless atoms and radiation in which nothing ever happens and Time, having lost every shred of meaning, rolls wearily on to infinity...