Word: trivialities
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...ends with an bit of literary taxidermy. The loose structure is contained within the story of Braithwaite's search for the stuffed parrot which served as the model for Loulou, the parrot of this housekeeper Felicite in Flaubert's tale "Us Center Simple" ("A. Simple Heart"). More than the trivial by-product of Braithwaite's loopy obsession, the quest for the real parrot becomes a tongue-in-beak metaphor for the essence of Flaubert...
...computer cannot, contribute much to the learning of open-ended subjects like moral philosophy, religion, historical interpretation, literary criticism, or social theory--fields of knowledge that cannot be reduced to formal rules and procedures. Since such subjects are among the most important in the curriculum, this limitation is hardly trivial. Computers are also incapable of inspiring students or serving as role models. They cannot conduct a genuine dialogue because they cannot comprehend analogies or metaphors or even understand conversation beyond the five-year-old level. Finally, machines can rarely tell why a student is experiencing difficulty in learning and understanding...
...what marks off that past from our present. Everything was then of importance." This qualified apology sounds like a reply to her friend and rival Virginia Woolf, who in 1919 dismissed the novels of Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett: "They spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring." Woolf's comment conveys an assuredness (this is trivial, that is transitory) that now seems sadly dated. West's wise record of small acts, daily tasks and obscure manners breathes with new life...
...turn dethroned underhandedly by none other than the secretly depraved Prudence. At this point occurs the long-anticipated "surprise ending"--not much of an ending and even less of a surprise: the tables are turned through a climactic game of blackjack (at least it isn't trivial Puritan), in which the Devil is foiled by none other than the Narrator (Fred Pletcher), who has remained a grotesquely audible and visible presence since the beginning of the prologue. But there's more: the Narrator, reveals himself, much to chenagrin--"I'm the author of this play, he proclaims with inexplicable arrogance...
...evidence of Michael Hastings' austere docudrama, Thomas Stearns Eliot--banker, publishing executive, playwright, premier poet of this century--passed his domestic life on automatic pilot, while his mind found refuge and flourished in the Waste Land. The play's Tom (Edward Herrmann) finds it "an enormous effort to be trivial" with people. He husbands his passion for the empty page. He is the hollow man, a prune and a prude with the secret sin of genius, which must not be dissipated in ordinary intercourse. This Olympian diffidence, Hastings suggests, was sufficient to make the young scholar from St. Louis...