Word: humdrum
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People who sweat out an ordinary, humdrum existence make up a world ever at war with "night people." This is the opinion advanced by a late-hour New Jersey disk jockey named Jean (after Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean) Shepherd, 33, whose burgeoning radio audience (estimated at 400,000) is largely a cult of Shepherd zealots...
...James Farl) Powers, 38, likes to explore a placid world that stirs with life only after some trifling event breaks up the humdrum of routine. It is the parochial world of pastors, curates and their parishioners. The mocked and pitied heroes of Powers' short stories are usually worldly U.S. Roman Catholic priests who have mislaid their sense of vocation in the hubbub of parish politics, bingo socials and Legion of Decency campaigns. Illinois-born and Catholic-reared. Author Powers brings an unsparing eye and a spare style to the subject of priestly frailty, but writes with enough basic compassion...
There is, simply, something which he cannot explain, something he sees in his affinity with the Romantics, which is for most readers inoperative. Even admitting that his voracious appetite for literary experience gives words a peculiar power, and that his "humdrum, prosaic happiness" of childhood makes the image of frozen nordic mythology powerful, even then I must doubt that many have experienced this thing which is at once unhappiness, grief and joy, for which he "would not exchange all the world's pleasures...
...Alone now, half starving and delirious, Willie stumbled over the 16,000-ft. passes to be welcorned by a local potentate. A Norwegian freighter, which called at Singapore as Japan's first bombs fell on Dec. 7, 1941, finally brought Willie to Canada, where he learned the comparatively humdrum business of handling fighter planes...
Then came the meteorological kink that turned humdrum Carol into a raging hazard by leading her toward shore. It was a deep wave in the planetary wind, part of a disturbance that had been detected while still over the Pacific more than a week before. By 3 a.m. Tuesday morning, the wind was headed toward the north, carrying Carol at 35 to 40 m.p.h. toward Long Island. Warnings went out at once, but most people along the endangered coast had gone to bed unworried, confident that Carol would pass them by. Instead, she churned destructively across southeastern New England, destroying...