Word: mindlessly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ginsberg pushes the question of reality a little too far with his media saturation-bombing. Almost to the point where one wonders if he isn't chronicling the fall of an American poet. If he is delicately trying to stress the depravity of America's mindless participation in an "Automatic Electronic War," his point is made too well. It's very easy to imagine his readers putting down these poems to go watch television...
...THAT PRESIDENT NIXON has accepted responsibility -- but not blame --for the Watergate affair, he has adopted a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil attitude. He implores the American people to overlook a few mindless campaign shenanigans, so he can return to the sanctity of the Oval Office, unbowed and untarnished...
...corpse. The result is a fast-moving, mildly absorbing but less than illuminating afternoon of light reading. No new light is shed on the matter, and the narrative shares the traits of its subject to a fault. Absence of mind may be appealing enough in the intoxicated flesh. But mindless prose about mindless protagonists, mindlessly cavorting in and out of bed from Cambridge to California, on this, that and and the other variant of a chemical lobotomy is next-of-kin to sheer trash...
There is a little more to the book than that kind of thing. There are beautiful lyric passages of Texas flash-floods and sunsets. There are swell jabs at "artistic" San Francisco hangers-on, mindless but elegant Harvardians slumming in Hollywood, and New York publishing pariahs who know all the names of their authors, but none of the thoughts behind them. Most impressive is a long episode focussed on an economic South Texas uncle, who lives on a huge sheep ranch, and does nothing but eat, curse out his Mexican help, and jeep over to his wife on another ranch...
Peddling is work, sometimes hard work, and anyone attending Irene ought to be forewarned that much of it is about as playful as a Detroit assembly line. The assembly-line touch might even be called the essence of Gower Champion. As a director, he is the relentless master of mindless mechanics. He has never paid more than trifling attention to the meaning of a show. A virtually meaningless show like Irene is an irresistible challenge to him since he can drive the cast and dancers into assembling the pieces, faster and faster and faster. As a result, his direction, like...