Word: pabulum
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...executives appeared at our official seminars. We were supplied no students, no blacks, no national politicians, no literary stars, no one likely to make waves-not even the most celebrated of Harvard's faculty lights. Our immediate predecessors-the Nieman class of 1968-69-had rebelled against such intellectual pabulum. In their case, the Nieman Curator (a former editorial page editor of the late New York Herald-Tribune, and a man of humorless mien) had proved so unyielding they were obliged to fund their "underground" seminars from their own pockets...
...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...