Word: tedious
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...schemes, Victoria was the object of endless political intrigue between court factions who wanted to influence the future monarch. "I will be good," the 11-year-old Victoria exclaimed with fervor when Lehzen revealed to her that one day she would be Queen. But life, meanwhile, was cruelly tedious. "I am very fond of pleasant society," she complained when 16, "and we have been for the last three months immured within our old palace. I longed sadly for some gaiety." The princess was a creature of exuberant vitality. As a diarist, for example, she tried to practice total recall, scribbling...
Even more troubling, though is the realism inherent in post-Modernist literature; in this, I mean the tedious reproduction of lived life naturalism, as opposed to the rich tradition of European Realism, which exaggerated human experience, celebrated a wide historical consciousness, and reconciled real conditions with desire. No reader, to whom what is actual is anathema, would quarrel with Osip Mandelstam's axiom that "The only thing that is real is the work itself;" when he concludes, though, that the artist "desires no other paradise than existence," Mandelstam reveals the divergence between readers and artists. Existence, which to the writer...
...focused backgrounds, and minute attention to period decor. In a cafe sequence there is even an exact duplication of a shot from Jules and Jim. But Truffaut is only going through the motions. At times he seems bored with his characters and one can hardly blame him. They are tedious people of a dull class in a dying culture...
McCullough gives detailed and sometimes tedious accounts of the infighting at the Bridge Company, which came under investigation when Tweed was exposed. The Company was not exactly a model of probity. Most of its funds came from the cities treasuries, but under its charter it was entirely controlled by private shareholders--which was not terribly surprising. The original impetus for a bridge came from a profit-minded contractor named William C. Kingsley, a good friend of Boss McLaughijn of Brooklyn...
...irritating thing is that the devisers of this production do not leave Weill enough alone. Arbitrarily, the show has a shipboard setting, and a tedious commentator. Donald Saddler has staged the numbers as if they were supper-club turns. The cast has fine voices, but the collective air of bouncy innocence somehow belies what is worldly, skeptical and melancholy in Weill's mental tone. This is Weill without tears, and it misses the distilled suffering that makes some of his music so affecting...