Word: schoolmarmishly
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...Bloom is uncharacteristically tentative. "Reading the very best writers -- let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy -- is not going to make us better citizens." And: "The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society." While discarding these schoolmarmish fallacies, Bloom's Common Readers are also advised to forget about picking up literature for enjoyment: "The text is there to give not pleasure but the high unpleasure or more difficult pleasure that a lesser text will not provide." (Among many personal asides scattered throughout the book, Bloom notes that...
...single picture to the courtroom bulletin board. The full-color glossy showed the TV room of the Menendez mansion in Beverly Hills, California, patriarch Jose lifeless on a couch, his wife Kitty in a smashed and bloodied heap on the floor. In blunt language that veered from the schoolmarmish to the sarcastic, Bozanich delivered her message: "Lyle Menendez, accompanied by his brother, planned this murder . . . this was an intentional killing...
...hits some of the more pathos-laden notes in songs such as "I Felt him Slipping Away" and "Breakfast over Sugar" as she tries to keep Marvin from leaving her. As Marvin's high school teacher, Rosemary Loar is generally funny in her over-the-top characterizations of the schoolmarmish yet sexually hungry Mrs. Goldberg, but her voice occasionally seems too thin. Julie Dixon seems less adept than the other two women in switching between being Marvin's high school sweetheart and being one of the chorus: while Loar and Kiley are distinctive as Marvin's wife and teacher...
...broadcasting stations -- not to cable channels, which can continue to lure young viewers with all the cartoons they want. The creation of a new category of educational fare, moreover, may simply ghettoize such programming and turn kids off. The very notion of educational TV often seems to reflect narrow, schoolmarmish notions. Live-action shows are almost automatically preferred over cartoons, and some sweetly innocent shows, like Barney and Friends, seem to win approval largely because they shelter kids from the rude real world -- a strange notion of education indeed...
...barbed wire along the old Iron Curtain, off would go the light in the red star over the parliament building, home would go trainloads of Soviet troops, in would come a non-Communist prime minister -- and the response from Washington was the sound of one hand clapping. There were schoolmarmish homilies about the need to "test" Gorbachev's slogan of new political thinking and complaints about what he had not done for the West lately...