Word: roomful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Museum Trips" from a forthcoming book by Carl Nagin is a short, funny story about a visit to the Fogg. In the Modern Art Room Rocko and the Narrator meet an employee who "wouldn't givya a nickel" for the $70,000 Brancusi wood sculpture Caryatid, which he calls Mrs. Murphy's Bedpost. He calls a Jackson Pollack "that horror over there" and says it was hung on its side last month, but he likes Olitski's Ariosto's Kiss because the "painting seems to move." They visit the Persian Rug Room twice, but the rugs are on the wall...
...Michael Arlen's immediate subject in The Living Room War is not the staggering charnel house we live in and which lives on us. It is that small, luminous, oracular, electronic avatar called television. Arlen is in passionate agreement with Richard Goodwin who writes: "We pass through all this tumult seated before the inexorable shadows of a TV set-certainly the greatest psychic disturber ever created...
...reason Michael Arlen bothered to produce two years of weekly columns on TV for The New Yorker, and then publish the best of them as The Living Room War, is that one hundred million or more people feed on television daily. It hammers them like malleable gold; it takes and does not give; it bludgeons man, and voraciously relieves him of whatever sensitivity he timorously guards. Television has been described with varying enthusiasm as the great galvanizer, tranquilizer, hypnotizer, pacifier, stupefier, paralyzer, agitator, commentator, activator, adjudicator, erupter, corruptor. It provides a daily vindication of American technological genius, a daily spectacle...
...FIRST impression about The Living Room War is that Arlen writes around his subject with stunning circumlocutory adeptness. But the persevering reader discovers that the essence of the matter is precisely this elusiveness. We sense the devil, all right, and know he is traducing our life, but how he pursues his subterranean mischief is maddeningly invisible...
...most popular female movie stars born in the Southwest. They are Carol Burnett, Joan Crawford, Linda Darnell, Dolores Del Rio, Greer Garson, Dorothy Malone, Mary Martin, Debbie Reynolds, Ginger Rogers, and Ann Sheridan. They are all standing, sitting, or lounging in what looks like a long pink powder room. Their cushions are velvet. And they're all in stunning silky gowns. They're beautiful. They're all smiling...