Word: pabulum
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...books published about Charles de Gaulle, the most engrossing may well be a little biography for children, complete with charming drawings and simple text. Yet the unknown author, writing under the pseudonym Xavier Arito-marchi, laces his pabulum with Tabasco. "La France est a moi," says young Charles as he plays soldiers, grabbing the French poilus for himself, while forcing his brothers to take the Ger man and English sides. There is another happy scene of Charles playing pyramid-standing on a shield held by his playmates. And on and on. The caption, beside a picture of De Gaulle nestled...
...says, "and some people who are not fit for all books." Literature, she believes, is a model demanding emulation; if the model is violence, violence follows. "Their interests," she says of Brady and Hindley, "were sadomasochistic, titillatory and sado-Fascist, and in the bookshops they found practically all the pabulum they needed...
...genius, Boswell as Pottle sees him is common man in microcosm, an all-too-human being rattling, prattling, wriggling, giggling, creeping, weeping along through a procrastinated adolescence like a great big lovable ninny who believes that all the world is his playpen and all possible experience his pabulum...
...streets are long and the street song. The birds fly over the days fly along. The birds all new A new day now for boy and girl for man and lady. This poetic pabulum somehow misses the tragic sense of life remembered from, say, Old Mother Hubbard or Three Blind Mice, and is, moreover, unchantable. Furthermore, those writing for today's young would not dream of mentioning a scandalous one-woman population explosion like Mother Hubbard and her substandard housing, and no farmer's wife would be allowed to behave so sadistically toward three handicapped mice...
...packed him off to the Aran Islands, conceivably the most significant trip in modern dramatic literature, for out of it came Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World. Again, if Yeats had not spoon-fed Dublin's infant Abbey Theater with the heady ethnic pabulum of Cathleen ni Houlihan, there would have been neither stage nor actors for the memorable tragi-comedies of Sean O'Casey. And above all, there was the matchless mature poetry of Yeats himself, not popular balladry as he had hoped, not mythic, mysterious and magical as he had planned...