Word: pallidity
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...Nothing; none; at no one; these glossy apparitions are as hollow as soap bubbles. The photographer has frozen moments that never were ? yet they tease us because their reality is beyond question, while our own stored moments, caught in snapshots and thrown into a drawer, are obvious and pallid fakes. Fascination sidesteps good sense, and we wonder: How was this lovely bunkum done...
Many of Bowen's stories were influenced by the work of Henry James and Virginia Woolf. What saves them from the pallid artiness of imitation is the author's taste for melodrama. She knows how to slip in the bizarre or improbable for the purpose of raising expectations, not eyebrows. Ghosts walk in some of these tales, and they are not explained away as wandering, ectoplasmic neuroses. They are what they are. Bowen's fiction is sometimes as strange as truth. In The Evil That Men Do-, a bored housewife writes a love letter...
Protestantism may not be quite as pallid as all that. One denomination in the study, the Southern Baptist Convention, is expanding, perhaps because it chooses ministers who ardently profess their biblical beliefs. Besides that, the book's conclusions are based on statistical averages, which tend to obscure the variety of vital congregations within all denominations. The survey, moreover, was taken in the mid-1970s and has only now managed to get into print. Meanwhile, according to a Gallup survey for Christianity Today magazine, younger ministers are becoming increasingly firm-and firmly religious-in their beliefs...
Some of Luongo's choices are more debatable. For the best appetizers, he picks the oysters Rockefeller served by Antoine's in New Orleans; they have sometimes proved a pallid parody of the original, which was reputedly invented at that watering hole. His candidate for best volcano, Kilauea on Hawaii Island, is surely a country mouse compared with Oregon's Mount St. Helens. Experts might challenge Luongo's contention that the best botanical garden is in St. Louis (New York City's in The Bronx is at least bigger); that the Beast at King...
Perhaps it's this pallid, celibate quality that makes My Bodyguard so appealing. Without redeeming prurient interest, the film draws attention to its charming heroes and revels in a puerile macho sensibility. Lacking Breaking Away's overwhelming charm, or Fame's exuberance, it's still...