Word: insipid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Irving clearly intends an affirmative answer to this question, although the evidence he offers on this point is far from conclusive. Quite late in the novel he is still calling his hero "vapid" and "eternally insipid," judgments that seem, unfortunately, pretty close to the mark...
...such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. But others he revered: John Milton, especially, whom he valued even above Dante. (He illustrated both.) Not only was Milton a republican and a sympathizer with regicides, but he also knew that the devil was beautiful, and so did Blake. Blake saw how insipid even Milton's descriptions of Paradise were compared with his visions of Hell, and pointed out that "the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing...
...father of the contemporary still life, relentlessly painted the same enamel bottles and china bowls for decades, using a palette that never wandered more than a shade away from gray. Like Morandi, Ablow is concerned with exploiting a pictorial brand of truth, discovering something universal in the shape of insipid junk...
...usual suspects are being hauled into the dock, from America's permissive gun laws and violent popular culture, to familial breakdown and the nihilistic ethos of adolescence. And everyone has a solution to offer, be it more gun control, more metal detectors, more psychiatrists, more teachers, or, in the insipid phrase of America's goo-goos, more "tolerance...
...grand hullabaloo that has been made in France over its very publication. While Houellebecq enthusiasts may claim that the unique cultural situation of France makes it difficult for readers of the translation to understand the novel's importance, such a justification has its limits. After reading its last insipid page, one is left with nothing so much as the sense that the fuss made over The Elementary Particles represents the biggest blunder in French taste since they bolted that millennium count-down clock to the Eiffel Tower...