Word: pointless
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...little Lord Tangent; Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Margot Metroland) and her son, Peter Pastmaster; Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and Viola Chasm. This glittering, blandly selfish, pretentiously stupid upper-class riffraff was to romp through most of Waugh's later books, sharing their futile power for pointless and appalling mischief with such later creations as raffish, rascally Basil Seal, motorbiking Father Rothschild (a member of a younger branch of the banking family, who had become a Jesuit priest), and the American evangelist, Mrs. Melrose Ape. With her cotton-winged angels (Chastity, Divine Discontent, et al.), Mrs. Ape wowed...
...with scraps of dialogue by the master, and embedded them all in Picasso: An Intimate Portrait (Prentice-Hall; $5), a book out this week. Sabartés evidently thinks that every detail and every chit of paper involving the artist is of equal value; his Portrait is loaded with pointless details about Picasso's living arrangements, his day-to-day existence and his favorite cafés. But the dull stretches are offset by Picasso's remembered obiter dicta. Samples...
...Portland Vase" was easily the most valuable and technically impressive piece in last week's show, but it would strike some 20th Century eyes as a pointless tour de force. Moderns were more apt to be impressed by the startling modernity of Wedgwood's own early designs. As the exhibition catalogue put it, "He realized the importance of what is now termed functionalism ... he insisted that lids should fit, that spouts should pour, and that handles should be comfortable to the hand...
...College idlers in the Square rumor has it that the sign "William L. Tutin, Bookseller," marks the entrance to a den of subversive activities. "It looks mighty suspicious to me," said one passerby, referring to the three frock-coated, be-spectacled employees scurrying to and fro in a seemingly pointless...
Dissenters grant Wolfe a large talent, but claim that his technical deficiencies prevented him from fully realizing his potentialities. Such critics are appalled by what they consider Wolfe's undisciplined and often pointless verbosity, his naive egotism and his outrageous lack of organized knowledge about the modern world. Bernard De Voto summed up this view in four words: "Genius is not enough...