Word: shapelessly
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...mildly hallucinatory to attend the Academy Awards for the first time. One flies 3,000 miles to behold the real thing, only to wander onto the set of a long and shapeless parody of the Johnny Carson Show: all has been pre-empted by television, redesigned in terms of the 19-in. screen. The rituals of former years have gone, or at least become so attenuated as to be barely recognizable. In the old days (one remembers from childhood newsreels) the stars used to come out, as they should, at night. Their exits from the black limos would...
This is landscape as seen by those who cannot escape, who must work on it. Such people were not rococo milkmaids. They were the rural lumpen proletariat, the rooted, shapeless mass brutalized by the agrarian disasters of the '40s and '50s. Millet was the first artist to make peasants a subject instead of an accessory. His paintings are an encyclopedia of work: digging, hoeing, planting potatoes, spreading manure...
...encounter with a senior boy at an English boarding school. As the tale is told, the listener grows restive: the narrative is replete with hidden motives, loose ends and awkward, tag-along sequels. "There is too much in it," the writer finally declares. He cannot possibly turn such a shapeless bundle of facts into a proper short story...
...should end the piece here; it is what is known as a good closer. You can hear everything but the chapel bells ringing at the end of the hour. But I want to go on to one thing else that needs saying and is peculiar to this strange, huge, shapeless class. Someone at CBS, talking about the intramural struggles taking place there, said. "What you're observing is not a war of liberation or even a drive for power itself, but a war of dislodgement...
...success of her book has surprised no one more than Jong, who considered it too "literary" for wide appeal. But literary it is not. Poorly constructed, too prone to phrases like "our mouths melted like liquid," it has a shapeless, self-indulgent plot and weak characterizations, especially of the men. But Isadora obviously has wide appeal. Says her creator: "Fear of Flying is a litmus test for everybody's mishegoss [Yiddish for craziness]." Warren Farrell, a spokesman for the men's liberation movement, feels that Fear of Flying will help free both sexes. As women take more initiative...