Word: monumentalism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this frenetic activity of critics, intent on instantly gauging the impact of every book, committing it to or excising it from the pages of literary history? If every new work which has been hailed or advertised in recent years as a 'new masterpiece,' an 'enduring monument' were collected, we would be in the midst of an extraordinary renaissance. Obviously this great literary revival has escaped general notice. But here again, within the beaten track of professional criticism, there is a pervasive sense of monotony, as if all the commentary masks a deeper literary ill health in America...
...Music Hall is not officially a historic monument, but it surely is something of a national shrine. As soon as it opened in 1932 as Rockefeller Center's "Showplace of the Nation," the theater became proof positive for millions of Americans that there was no bigness like show bigness. Something preposterously grand about the Music Hall raised it above its nearby (and now nearly forgotten) movie-palace rivals, like the Roxy or the Paramount: its scale, its colossal adornments, its dizzying spaciousness. Its founding impresario, the late S.L. ("Roxy") Rothafel, loved to boast that it was the largest indoor...
...very good film, although considering the talent involved in this one--direction by the intermittently brilliant Carl Reiner and a script by the dependably slick Larry Gelbart--Oh God! should have been an irreverent romp. What emerges is an overlong television sketch, a limp, unimaginative, and boring monument to middle-class tolerance; in short, a popular favorite that could set comedy back...
...Niech zyje [long life]!" It was one of the few occasions when he had firsthand contact with ordinary Poles, many of whom regard him as a symbol of freedom because of his support for human rights. Later, when he placed flowers at the Nike (Greek for victory) monument to the Poles who died in a 1944 uprising against the Nazis and at the memorial to the Jews massacred in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, police kept away all but a handful of official observers. The Polish government had tried to persuade Carter not to visit either site. The first...
...three miles from downtown Cairo, stands a simple rest house occasionally used by President Sadat. Its principal feature is a wide veranda that overlooks the Pyramids. The light and shadows constantly change the shape of these massive triangles leaning against each other. These are structures at once simple and monumental; they have endured the elements and man's depredations for as close to eternity as man can reach by his own efforts. In no other place in the world is man forced into humility so exclusively by one of his own accomplishments. In this sea of sand split...