Word: sordidness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Cambridge to a region replete with little green gnomes rollicking gaily. Before him and toward the horizon there loomed a macabre but wavering to the left and then to the right. A low wailing emitted from the narrow brick chimney. The Vagabond rushed thither to peer sureptitiously into a sordid room. A child, not much older than three, indifferently sucked its index finger; a woman, with delicate almost mask-like features brushed her hair, occasionally glancing at the child, then to a corner where an elderly man, sitting on a crummy stool, whittled whistlewood: His salt worn cheeks, drawn closely...
...more attractive aspect of the reforming intellectuals in 19th century America, an aspect which books like Gilbert Seldes' "The Stammering Century" have tended to cover up. The lives of these two New Englanders, veering sometimes towards faddisms, nevertheless possessed a consistent and admirable idealism and rose above the sordid dementia of most of the contemporary nostrums and reforms. From such studies as this one learns how much in the so-called "lunatic fringes" of New England, and wider human areas, is worthy of admiration instead of contempt...
...Allen, art-collecting wife of Kansas' onetime Governor Henry Justin Allen: ". . . Cyclones, gospel trains, the medicine man, the man hunt, are certainly to be found in Kansas but why must Mr. Curry paint these freakish subjects? His self-portrait shows . . . a boyhood that has only seen the most sordid conditions of life . . . [not] the glories of his home State, the beauties of the simple life of the farmers. I wonder whether this is not just a phase through which he will pass and will soon come to see something beautiful in life, and particularly life in Kansas." No Kansan...
...most professional and appealing fancy dress. From having that vaguely apologetic look on the living-room table, it has progressed to actual self-assertion; and instead of being springy and recalcitrant in the hand, it is entirely pleasant and manageable. Moreover, it has come down to sordid matters of economics and succeeds in giving the buyer what appears to be his money's worth, for the first time in a lean and sheaf-like decade...
Metropolitan--"Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing." Sordid glimpses of life at another of our great institutions...