Word: humdrum
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...versatile author in her own right, will expect something unusual from A Pin to See the Peepshow. Readers to whom she is not even a name may be agreeably surprised at the bright zest of its introductory pages, increasingly depressed as its long middle section threatens to turn hopelessly humdrum. But they will do well to persevere. From boring realism the story finally emerges into agonizing, deeply moving life...
...beach. A poet and a War veteran, Richard Aldington is neither trash nor treasure but an excellent example of a soundly second-rate writer. A poet by trade, Author Aldington has lately turned to satirical novels whose unenlightened realism makes good reading for those who like their humdrum with a seasoning of malice. Since English Author Aldington puts only his own countrymen in his pillory portraits, U. S. readers can gaze on them with a certain equanimity. Latest Aldington exhibit is the Emancipated Female, British style...
...modesty ? Author Herbert George Wells will continue to be taken at his face value as one of the First Citizens of the (nonexistent) World State. Autobiographer Wells denies that he is a dual personality but admits having a persona, an idea of himself somewhat at variance with the humdrum facts. Of late his persona has been a little under the weather. To get his persona back on its feed he has written this highly Wellsian Experiment in Autobiography...
Absinthe connoisseurs contemptuously observed that the humdrum bourgeois statesmen who make up the present Cabinet were wasting their time debating anxiously such a minor factor as the alcoholic strength of a drink which gets its chief effect from wormwood (absinthium) which contains the powerful narcotic absinthin. The alcohol in absinthe acts as the carrier and catalyst of the drug in its subtle assault upon the brain. Neither wormy nor a wood, wormwood is a bitter-tasting weed fairly common in Europe and the U. S. under such local names as madderwort, mugwort, ming-wort, warmot and wermuth. Swiss farmers never...
...shall long hang heavy there. Complacent bovines were once, and perhaps still may be allowed to roam gracefully through the greensward, and unmolested give their milk for Harvard, but birds and even beasts of other colors are ruthlessly driven from the protecting shelter, not, alas, out merely into the humdrum whirl of exhaust-filled urbanity, but straightway to meet the ill-aimed shots of citified big game hunters; allowed no longer like the cows to give forth their flowing liquid...