Word: sheerly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...growing need for electronic imagery rises from the sheer number- crunching power of computers like those shown in Santa Clara. Says Craig Upson, a graphics specialist who last August left a commercial animation firm to join the staff of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois: "You find yourself lost in this maze of data because suddenly you can compute far more than you can comprehend." The route to comprehension, he says, is to turn the numbers into images...
Fortunately, Extreme is spared a place in the fascist hall of fame by its own sheer stupidity. Characters constantly spew out little homespun bits of wisdom that are supposed to show how in touch with the real world they are but actually reveal how completely distant they are from even the most generous definition of sanity. Are we supposed to take Rip Torn seriously when he explains that "the federal government is nothing but a bunch of child molesters"? It is the saving grace of Extreme that even if we're supposed to accept these epigrams, we don't have...
...Classical" music, as can be seen from the sheer number of composers, is difficult to make sense of, and any categorization is approximate and limiting. To try to comprehensibly describe in words the works of a composer, much less a group of composers, is an impossibility, for most classical music uses neither words nor images. In the end, the proof is in the pudding. Buy recordings of music you like and go to concerts where it is being played...
Though Kinison stretches the bounds of good taste, his bombast can be furiously funny. His rantings against women, for instance, may outrage some, but they are a cathartic antidote to cool yuppie relationship-speak, brazen in their sheer excess. "I'm not worried about hell," he says, " 'cause I was ((exploding into a shout)) married for two f years! Hell would be like Club Med!" A stint at the piano for a song to his ex-girlfriend turns into a string of obscenities ending with "I want my records back!" His blasphemous accounts of the Last Supper and the Resurrection...
...sheer discursiveness of The Thanatos Syndrome lends itself to all manner of loose, didactic, free-associative diatribe. We're so swept up by the movement of the novel--and this novel does move; it has a wonderful clip--that we find ourselves swallowing pop-philosophical placebos, medicines Percy, a physician, might have prescribed better elsewhere...