Word: triviale
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Forty-First Thief by Edward A. Pollitz Jr. (Delacorte; $8.95) is a perfect book for someone stranded at an airport by a delayed flight. It is well enough written to hold boredom temporarily at bay but so trivial that if left behind at O'Hare Airport, one would be less disturbed than if one had misplaced a book of matches. The author's fancy here is that an eccentric inventor, working in secrecy at St.-Tropez, is on the point of perfecting a solar-powered car. The Arabs are out to stop him before he sells his process...
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...