Word: shallowing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...alone it is a glorified mud puddle, finely churned by the hundreds of motorcycles that scramble back and forth. In the middle a naked man is rolling about in the mire. The deeper he sinks, the greater the crowd's pleasure. A few thousand people now mill about this shallow, bowl-like dip of land, waiting for another victim, throwing empty cans of beer at each other. For the present they must content themselves with stoning the engine of an already charred hulk. Here there is no real audience. If you are not throwing rocks or Molotov cocktails...
...Bits of Paradise the characters are shallow, their situations trite, and the resolutions predictable. As a result, Scott's common themes--loneliness, disillusionment, fascination with the superficial-- which are usually well-engineered and gripping, grow repetitive and dull. "Love in the Night" like several other stories in this collection, ends with a saccharine postscript amounting to "they married and lived happily ever after." "The Dance" which involves a jealous murder, is so blatant that it reads like a cruddy mystery. Where plot and dialogue run thinnest, Fitzgerald seems to dwell on elaborate descriptions of resorts, bars, and clothes, reducing stories...
Open campaigns have been the fashion, especially among Republicans, who are alert to the lessons of Watergate. Contributors at a recent G.O.P. cocktail party in San Diego dropped three and four-figure checks into a shallow dish by the door, then watched bemusedly as the host invited reporters to examine the checks...
...Russian and especially English fiction." We don't get a satisfying view, though. Wives and books--all, apparently, harlequins-- remain "outlines directed by reason" (to use the words of a younger Nabokov) seen as though through "the faceted eye of an insect." Vadim's wives are never more than shallow foils for his self-indulgence. One can't help suspecting that he needs so many (real-life Vladimir has married only once) for no better reason than to provide, as he proposes to each in turn, four different opportunities to describe an odd mental dysfunction: Vadim cannot imagine turning around...
When Ry (short for Ryland) Cooder's fourth and latest album, Paradise and Lunch, popped up at the shallow end of the charts this summer, the reaction at Warner Bros. Records was gratification tinged with a trace of awe. Cooder has no gruesomely elaborate stagecraft or lifestyle, and his work is not the sort that goes down easily with Carly Simon fans or Elton John aficionados. His music is elegantly eclectic, running from Leadbelly and Sleepy John Estes blues numbers through main-line ballads of the 1940s to reggae and rock 'n' roll. "Ry's pure...