Word: plonks
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...Then throw it in the wastebasket. Hortense Calisher, a novelist (False Entry, Textures of Life) and short-storyteller of formidable skill, has unaccountably produced in Journal from Ellipsia a prodigious intellectual plonk: the autobiography of a-well, maybe it is a Hegelian monad, maybe it is an unborn soul, maybe it is a visitor from outer space, maybe it is just something the lady ate. Whatever it is, she writes about it in a style that combines the least admirable characteristics of James Joyce and Henry James with a Hortenseness all her own, and she writes about...
...Mare ain't what she used to be. Nevertheless she is, as the French say, green-which means, as the Americans say, blue. The plot, for example, involves a Rabelaisian family feud in which the antagonists fight to a finesse and take each other's wives. Best plonk: when a farmer finds a stranger dossing down with his dairymaid, he bawls indignantly, "Be off with you! I can handle the servants without outside help...
...Broadcasting Commission has trumpeted the cultural values of good music as a measure of a town's civic taste. In towns whose chief diversion formerly was hunting kangaroos and rabbits, overflow crowds climb nearby trees to listen through the open windows. Occasionally, aborigines show up and solemnly swig plonk (Australian slang for wine...
...Honk, Plonk. In Casteldaccia, Sicily, police had to rescue Bus Driver Paolo Alliotta, 33, from a mob of townsmen, who stoned him because he blew his horn to clear traffic, awoke them from their sidewalk naps...