Word: stolidness
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...depressing quality of much American public behavior-from Connors to T shirts-is its edgy meanness. Bad enough that it is calculatedly cheap. Worse is the stolid nastiness of it, the rock in the snowball, the compulsion to affront. Even re lentless candor - wounding friends or family by telling them their defects in the name of honesty-is a symptom not only of stupidity but also of unkindness and buried anger...
...seems to owe more to taxidermy than to photography. In some respects, no medium was less appropriate for chronicling old Russia than the primitive camera. The dead stillness required of the subject, though unnatural to everyone, was singularly unsuited to the Russians' vitality, spontaneity and general rambunctiousness. How stolid they look, gathered silently and ceremoniously around the samovar in the garden at tea time, when, as we can guess from Chekhov and Turgenev, they were surely spellbinding talkers. The trouble with such snapshots from a nation's family album is that they must be viewed with a head...
...ENSUING TRIAL, stolid Herman takes the rap and goes to prison in Maria's stead. For her part, she comes to visit him daily and swears loyalty to their new life once he is freed. Fassbinder deftly mingles pathos with farce in teary scenes as the couple communicates through bars during prison visiting hours...
...image on a television screen. A brusque man, a stolid face, the body of a peasant. He descended the airplane ramp and kissed the asphalt of East Boston. And through the cluttered landscape of eyes and ears and signs that viewed him, he smiled warmly and told them all to condemn abortion, to uphold marriage, to aid the weary and the poor. He looked at masses of well-to-do's, of down-vested students all packed off to Business and Law and Success School and told them to forsake "possessions" and to forsake themselves, for Christ...
...would have burst a row of wineglasses. I saw coincidences everywhere; meanings darted and danced like overheated molecules." Spencer's tensely energetic prose catches perfectly the lyricism and bombast of single-minded passion. It also registers some sweet and extraordinarily complicated moments involving David and his parents, stolid ex-Communists painfully falling out of love with each other. After the fire, forbidden by a court ever to see the Butterfields again, David secretly begins tracking them down-in New York, then in Vermont. He is reunited with Jade. She is much changed, of course; it is part of Spencer...