Word: soundingly
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Picking up trash and pulling weeds may not sound terribly posh, but at a growing number of high-end resorts, where rooms often cost $400 or $500 a night, these activities are becoming yet another hotel amenity. One morning you can sleep in and order room service, and the next you can serve breakfast at a soup kitchen...
...dialogue becomes grating, however, when the film’s characters stop following normal conversation patterns, and instead begin to communicate with speeches that sound like contrived publicity blurbs for art shows. “Your work pushes the boundaries of modern thought, thrusting past the limitations of human emotion and cognition to create the ultimate expression of human consciousness,” Madeleine enthuses to an artist during a show. These kinds of inflated, preposterous mini-monologues quickly grow tiresome, and instead of humorously mocking the bourgeoisie art world, they come across as simply an irksome staple...
Nevertheless, poetry has an oral component, and though it is underemphasized, there is something awoken in any poem when it is actually spoken out loud. Echoing sounds connect lines that are semantically distinct. An emphasis placed on a key syllable can release meaning in the same way a sound wave can shatter glass. Listening to a poem is to hear language in its most primitive usage: expression of the unapparent. But what happens when no one, save for the most astute listeners, can understand what is being expressed? Does this not defeat the original point of even talking...
...starts with the sound of the poet’s voice. That, after all, is really all one gets at such a performance. I’ve found that poets tend to have beautiful reading voices. It makes sense, given that their vocation requires them to be as intimate with words as a carpenter with wood. It is the most immediate pleasure of a reading, the way the sound of an instrument pleases more immediately than the composer’s melody. I remember, when Simon Armitage read in Houghton Library earlier this semester, sitting in rapt attention...
Inside the room, viewers become witnesses to an unfolding story, played out through the windows and accompanying sound. The scene begins uneventfully, but ominously. Pundit-like voices discussing a Middle Eastern war flood the room, and then sounds of everyday life replace the conversation. The shadow of a soccer ball flits by the projected window. Other voices chatter in Arabic while music plays in the background. The scene seems unexceptional, but the shadow of a helicopter signals the chaos that is to come...