Word: mania
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...Quotidian" was one of Arnold Bennett's favorite words. Dailiness was his mania. The best of his realistic novels about hard life in North Staffordshire are triumphant patchworks of detail about people who worked in the fields or the potteries, their habits, routes and involuntary timetables. In his own life, even when he was a millionaire Edwardian novelist with a yacht and country houses, he wrote as many as 5,000 words virtually every day. The total result is practically incalculable. Margaret Drabble lists 84 "major" works-mostly novels and plays-but beyond that there are diaries, frivolities, criticism...
Moreau felt he was lionized for the wrong reasons. "One has never seen such a mania for the invisible," he jotted grumpily, "such exclusive addictions to dream, mystery, mysticism, symbolism and the undefined." Under the circumstances it seems ironically right that three-quarters of a century after he died of stomach cancer in Paris, Moreau should now be having his first American retrospective in that breeding pool of every psychic fad, Southern California. Composed of 88 oils, water-colors and drawings, it has been assembled by Art Historian Julius Kaplan for the Los Angeles County Museum...
Everyone went to the movies in those days, and by all accounts most people went unselfconsciously and without critical pretense. The movie mania died out all across the country: most people say because of T.V., but there were other reasons as well...
With baseball mania now sweeping Beantown, it is only right that we focus our predictions on the American League's Eastern Division. Rather than name the squads and their strengths from best to worst, it might be better to work from the bottom up, that is, to first clear out the deadwood...
Price indexing, too, has become a mania; art buyers want to have value lists analogous to the Dow Jones charts. Unfortunately, the statistics are nearly always incomplete, inaccurate and full of special pleading; even so, they have helped crystallize the fantasy that the desire for art can somehow be statistically measured. By far the quaintest manifestation of this to date has been a rating system cobbled together by a young financial tipster named Willi Bongard, which recently appeared in Capital (a monthly German management magazine) and was reported in the Wall Street Journal. His artcom-pass purports to grade...