Word: pompousity
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...tone tends to be annoying rather than actually offensive. It does, however, become incredibly pompous in Siegfried Giedion's article on "Continuity and Change in the Vocation of the Architect" when Giedion quotes himself three times...
...argument should be clear by now. The Deans should be answered through letters couched in terms of warmth, joy, humor, perspective, and love. Rather than discussing sex at Harvard, we should discuss why Harvard is often joyless, pompous, cold, and frantic. The real scandal occurs not when a Harvard man seduces a 'Cliffie, but when he is ashamed to say "I love you" because it is not cool, and when he is afraid to express warmth because it is naive...
Despite its sumptuous sets, the scene falls flat because it is peopled with characatures. The giggling girls, the pompous general, and the swooning old ladies could be taken from any number of films. And Visconti does not merely present them; he dwells on them. Moreover, he takes two of Lampedusa's most vivid characters and drams them of life. Don Calegro, the uneducated but shrewd mayor, becomes a drunken buffoon. Tancredi, the Prince's favorite, undergoes a rather obvious transition from youthful revolutionary to foppish conservative as the middle class reaction to change sets...
...have a feeling Miss McCarthy was once snubbed (being from Seattle and all) by a group similar to the one she depicts. Her mocking bitterness distorts her perception; the characters are not whole because they are almost always naive or pompous or absurd. I cannot attribute Miss McCarthy's lack of sympathy to her unrepentent realism (as Arthur Mizener did in The New York Times). She has a past history of carrying on personal vendettas in her published fiction, and I sense this is a grudge of long standing only now being extirpated...
Yesterday, for the first time in two months, I entered Widener, only to find that what some people jocosely term "progress" had swept over this bastion of learning. Gone were the little blue cards I had known and loved! In their place were IBM cards with the pompous instructions, PLEASE WRITE FIRMLY TO MAKE CARBON DO NOT BEND CARD...