Word: trivia
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...Cyril Connolly's highbrow British magazine Horizon. The published fragments read sometimes like a sophisticated traveler's guidebook, sometimes like a recital of Important People I Have Known, sometimes like Major Hoople, sometimes like crumbs from Winston Churchill's table. But the mass of entertaining trivia is shot through with eloquence, wit, and an artist's imagery...
Such writing tends to be symbolie to the point where everything is a symbol and nothing is real, which is a point of meaninglessness. It tends to deal with undefined moods, hazily defined characters, and ponderously defined natural trivia, e.g., "They sat on an ironwood tree's outcropping roots, roots tangled like gray fingers in wild interplay with Medusa's hair." It tends to make the reader suspect that the author is sentimentally fond of writing, but unfortunately finds himself with nothing or little to say about people or events. Generally, although not necessarily, authors with something to say take...
...Victorian Age, Red Plush is one of those placid novels that wallow in family trivia, delight in minor, certain-to-be-resolved family crises and snicker at family eccentrics. The family is accorded an existence of its own, dominating and dwarfing the individual characters; it becomes a sort of metaphysical entity, unexplored and uncriticized, that remains firm and true, regardless of the peccadilloes of its members. The reader is therefore seldom aroused about the fate of any individual Moorhouse. For even if erratic David were to choose the wrong bride (though he does not) or if moody Phoebe were...
...book is a series of admonitory letters from Screwtape, a fiendishly knowing member of Hell's "Lowerarchy," to his nephew Wormwood, a novice tempter who is grappling with the Enemy for one of his first souls. The irony with which Lewis catalogues all the trivia most likely to keep man from God has made Screwtape a modern classic. Samples...
...Editors, he had "no time for the contemplation of the navel . . . no desire to translate the editorial 'we' into the imperial 'we.' . . . The one-man editor is going to be guilty sometimes of bad and muddy writing. He must sometimes beat a hasty retreat into trivia if he wants to get home to dinner. If he confuses himself with the editorial staff of the New York Times, he is going to fill his page with half-baked opinions...