Word: minorly
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...rather like listening to the postprandial monologue of a cantankerous old guest at a literary dinner. One is at first amused by all the iconoclasm: After all, why should the reputations of Powell or Chaudhuri matter these days? One then begins to demur: Is Philip Larkin really a "minor" poet? Is the Caribbean really a place of "spiritual emptiness"? Finally one balks completely - at Naipaul's tiresome insistence on referring to the black population of Trinidad as "Negroes," for example, or at his relentless tone of acidity and disdain (India has "no autonomous intellectual life;" both the BBC and Oxford...
...Stoppard hoofing it through the theater district on a bum foot would be disconcerting to people who think of the playwright as something of an élitist. Ever since his sensational stage debut in 1967 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--his absurdist riff on a pair of minor characters in Hamlet--Stoppard has become almost a genre unto himself, taking intellectual, often abstruse subject matter and turning it into challenging yet playful drama. His game, frequently, is the oddball juxtaposition: moral philosophy and gymnastics (Jumpers); Fermat's last theorem and Byron's love poetry (Arcadia); James Joyce and Vladimir...
...characters because, especially at first, they were intended for little kids. But particularly with the appearance of the long, violent later books, Rowling allowed her witches and wizards to grow up, to get zits and begin romances, to kill and die. It seemed odd that not even a minor student character at Hogwarts was gay, especially since Rowling was so p.c. about inventing magical creatures of different races and species, incomes, national origins and developmental abilities. In a typical passage, Blaise Zabini is described as a "tall black boy with high cheekbones and long, slanting eyes." Would it have been...
...grows in the endangered regions. For those accustomed to living in urban areas, that makes sense - the job of a city fire department is to stop blazes before they damage property. But that's not how things work in the great Western forests. Paradoxically, trying to put out every minor blaze may raise the risk for the occasional megafire since the forests are not permitted to do their important work of occasionally clearing out accumulated vegetation. This is a little like letting newspapers pile up in your kitchen: If a fire occurs, the place is primed to blow. "These larger...
Peña, who held minor roles in “Crash” and “Babel,” agreed. “There are a bunch of bright minds here. I dropped out of high school, so I don’t even know what your world is like, but it looks pretty awesome...I don’t have the Harvard mind but I have the aesthetic mind,” explaining that he hopes his portrayal will inspire others to activism...