Word: static
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...distinguished thing" yields to no potions or megadoses of prose. DeLillo's gifts are lavish, but his vision is a bit facile. The white noise of the title is electronic static forced into symbolic service as some sort of universal death rattle. Throughout, technology is depicted as the ominous messenger of our common fate; even the price scanners in supermarkets are spooky. Discovering malevolence in things and systems rather than in people is a little callow, especially when DeLillo's solemn moralizing overruns his comedy. Perhaps that is why, after eight books, he still seems like a writer making...
...Rizzoli; 318 pages; $85) is a particolored object lesson in how art is overtaken by commerce. Carpets and rugs from the 16th and 17th centuries demonstrate an imagination all but forgotten in modern examples. An antique Agra is alive with a profusion of delicate figuring; a new Agra is static and merely crowded. Inadvertently or not, Gans-Ruedin's selections give the reader a chance to compare the finest rugs with the run of the mill. It is one's best defense against a dealer's trumped-up superlatives...
...Marxist language and tone often undercut the development of the characters as individuals. Moreover, while many of Strindberg's speeches are poetic and inspirational, much of the script is repetitious. The virtual absence of any physical action, coupled with a cast of only three characters, makes for a dangerously static 90 minutes if director and cast aren't careful...
...this makes for slow action; a static quality pervades the stories. There is no movement or direction; the stories are themselves suspended in time. The narrators try to relate episodes which encompass vast spans of time and succeed only in describing trivial incidents meaningless in themselves. Guessing, wondering, regretting, and yearning constitute most of the action in these episodes. The tendency is to pause and to look inside, silently...
...those who regard Miss Manners as an eccentric anachronism, Judith Martin has a contemporary answer. "It would be ridiculous to say that manners should be static, and we should return to 1948 and behave like that," she says. "The world changes and develops. There are lots of new situations." She has always been richly prepared for them. Printers at the Post, she recalls, tried to embarrass her years ago by telling off-color stories. "I'd look right at them and say, 'I don't understand it. Could you explain it to me?' Have you ever...