Word: prolix
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book most at issue is his 767-page tome Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (Seabury; $24.50), published in Dutch in 1974. The writing is prolix, to put it mildly. But Jesus makes clear that the author is heavily influenced by liberal Protestant Bible scholarship of the past century. In this modern approach, the Gospels are not the unquestioned Word of God but collections of competing evidence about Jesus Christ, various layers of tradition subject to interpretation that may or may not bear resemblance to what the historical Jesus did or said. English-language reviewers of Jesus have been less confounded...
...with fauna, so with flora. Dried leaves, cacti, moss, shrubs, tree trunks: the vegetable kingdom was there in quantity. Usually these pieces were mock-scientific-prolix classifications of fruit stains or upside-down plants at the Dutch pavilion, or, at the French, Roy Adzak's archaeological pastiche of fruit and vegetables embedded in plaster. In the Finnish pavilion, a sculptor named Olavi Lanu set forth a whole environment called Life in the Finnish Forest-blurred human figures made of earth, live moss, birch bark and other organic material. Granted that these quaint vegetative trolls would have looked better...
Since New York is still the cultural capital of the world, the Times's critics understandably exert formidable power. Theater Critic Clive Barnes can easily kill a Broadway play with a negative notice, which may be the reason why many readers find his prolix reviews generally far too kind. Ada Louise Huxtable, now part of the nine-member editorial board, is probably the most influential commentator on architecture in the country. The Times has also broadened its cultural reviews to include regular coverage of rock and other outgrowths of the counterculture that would not have made its pages...
...joke about the attempts of a mad pedant to write about the life and work of a poet whom he barely knew and whose qualities eluded him completely. The book seemed to be the very last laugh at the extremes of the New Criticism-destructive works of literary detection, prolix biographies, and any number of other sins against common sense and the simple enjoyment...
...ecological lament for the disappearance of The Blue Whale (Columbia University); in philosophy and religion, Martin E. Marty's Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (Dial); and for translation, Austryn Wain-house's heroic failure to quite transform French Nobel Prizewinner Jacques Monod's prolix inquiry into biological evolution Chance and Necessity (Knopf) into readable English...