Word: smugness
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...Delusions, etc. points to this funny twist of Irony in his Belief. The book is mainly a series of daily prayers, some overwhelmingly joyous, many serious addresses to God. Only a few of these last poems are sad. But then there is the title, and a picture of a smug Berryman staring out--is he laughing to himself or finally at ease...
...changes it has undergone in the past year. The very real events which quickened the anger of students--most notably the war in Indochina--are purposely forgotten by the technicolor pictures, the catchy, cute Timese, the mock attempt to mix levity and analysis. The vapid generalization and the smug clichevie for supremacy, and the product passes for hard-won analysis...
...ASSUMED I wouldn't like Paul Simon. I didn't like Simon and Garfunkel. Arthur was as precious as anyone deliberately called Artie could be. I found their music smug and overconfident; it represented the worst of the thoroughly reprehensible middle sixties "folkie" tradition. It was all there in "Homeward Bound;" its singer's over-inflated, self-pitying view of himself was combined with a banal excursion into sentiment. By the time S and G had reached the self-conscious artiness of "The Boxer," they had dissipated their creative impulse, aad were selling two million records at a crack...
...home run nevertheless. Roth takes a myth that everyone knows is destroyed anyway, and picking apart the baseball ethos lovingly, savoring its madness and its magnetism, he betrays an exasperated affection for it that he may not have felt when he began. He leaves us laughing but wistful, smug but reverent, and with a musty, clinging air of ambivalence about lost American dreams. Perhaps it's despair folded over, cynicism gone hysterical, or a commercial fake, but Smitty takes us on a sympathetic journey...
...creative evolution exalted the spirit of man and his ability to find basic reality through intuition. Then, in 1905, Jacques and Raïssa, now newlyweds, happened into a life-changing friendship with Novelist Léon Bloy, a wild, irascible spirit and passionate Catholic who preached to his smug culture that faith and social conscience were inseparable. "Money," Bloy once wrote, "is the blood of the poor." Both of the Maritains were baptized as Catholics...