Word: trivial
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Clarke attacks again and again with his vile pen, but the subjects of his wit seem trivial: physical punishment in the (mostly Catholic) schools of Ireland, the poor treatment of orphans, the collusion between Irish missionaries and Irish businessmen in poor countries. But what finally comes through in reading several of these poems is a deep commitment to the people of his country and a hatred of the hypocrisies of religion as it is still practiced in Ireland today. His later poetry suffers from its topicality, and it will probably not endure the tests of time and place, but somehow...
Besides this seemingly more "faithful" representation of reality. Tanner uses a disjunctive montage--scenes begin and end arbitrarily--that endows trivial gestures and cursory phrases with a heightened significance. Paul, driving his car along a country road after visiting Adriana, pulls into a dirt lane, pushes back his seat, rolls up the window, and closes his eyes to go to sleep--then another date announcing a new day flashes on the screen. Adriana sits alone nude in her drab room, cooking some broth on her hot plate; she gets up from her chair and slips into a robe; she returns...
...always a good sign? Could it be that an egalitarian structure makes staff members go to the wall to protest policies they would tolerate on a more traditional newspaper, simply because they resent anything that smacks of hierarchy? Real Paper staff members recall instances of pitched battles waged over trivial matters, and many cite a sort of combat fatigue as a reason they now want to sell. "The place is a snakepit, it's awful," says...
...Psycho History Quanto-History, and History (University of Chicago Press) he cites the depths of the problem he and some other older historians see: The historical sense in modern populations is feeble or nonexistent, as Ortega pointed out, even though the mania for keeping records, building archives, and celebrating trivial anniversaries is rampant. Indeed it is probably the decline of a true sense of history that encourages those pseudo-historical manifestations...
...North Vietnam, and the following April the U.S. used B-52 bombers for the first time to wreak massive and arbitrary destruction on the North. And only five years ago in April, 1970 President Nixon initiated the U.S. incursion into Cambodia. This April, too, each week brings fresh evidence--trivial or crucial, comic or tragic--of the continuing strength the most shameful strands in American history. As the country refers to old slogans about taxation without representation, it learns of an Internal Revenue Service training school that plied undercover agents with liquor and women, 'objects' it evidently regarded as equally...