Word: sheerness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...usual sphere of unfiled phantasmagoria. It taxes the strings, quite successfully, to the hilt, with truncated, screeching tremolos, portamentos, and sounds produced with the back of the bow. But the more familiar this listener becomes with Schoenberg's devices, the less is he able to be content with the sheer magnificent discoveries of sounds, and the more is he confirmed in his preconception that a work of art demands by nature a connecting tissue alien to Schoenberg's methods...
...Castle by telephone. "The receiver gave out a buzz of a kind that K. had never heard on a telephone. It was like the hum of countless children's voices-but yet not a hum, the echo rather of voices singing at an infinite distance-blended by sheer impossibility into one high but resonant sound which vibrated on the ear as if it were trying to penetrate beyond mere hearing." K. asks when he can come to the Castle. " 'Never,' was the answer...
Most of this is kidded with all the subtlety of a fire alarm, though Philip Coolidge, as the dyspeptic professor, offers some deft deadpan satire. But Barefoot Boy, like its predecessors, trades mostly on zip, pace, and the sheer commodity value of youth itself. It gets a fair measure of these; but the Abbott trademark is beginning to seem perilously like a rubber stamp. And Barefoot Boy is very much poorer than its predecessors in the matter of music, and not quite so peppy in its dancing...
Englishmen abroad, he has observed, show an unexpected interest in their church -probably out of sheer homesickness. And church-sponsored social gatherings are livelier affairs than the stuffy whist drives at home. But the church's appeal is not all nostalgia. "Of course," says Selwyn cheerfully, "a great many people think a parson's a fool, and come to us for a loan with some cock & bull story about being robbed on the Metro...
...Cliffhangers. A Study of History is dominated by an image of genius. The view is of the chasm of precipitous time. On its sheer rock walls, as the eye of the spectator adjusts itself to the somber light of human history, are seen the bodies of climbers. Some, prone and inert, lie on the ledges to which they have hurtled to death. Some dangle, arrested, over the void as they cling by their fingernails to cliffs too steep for their exhausted strength to scale. Above these, a few still strain upward in a convulsive effort to attain a height hidden...