Word: trivializes
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...Festival of Britain at which it transported more than 2 million passengers; it is now the puffing pride of Toronto, installed at the Ontario Science Center. The Gentleman's Flying Machine is powered by a Wandering Hot Air Brazier and "a swarm of underslung butterflies providing a trivial lift to the nose section...
Rowland Emett has had more than trivial genetic lift. His grandfather was Queen Victoria's court engraver, his father an amateur inventor. Emett himself has put wires together and lines on paper since early childhood. At 13 he devised a novel gramophone windup mechanism-just as gramophones succumbed to electricity. Undeterred, he became a stellar and sometimes lunar cartoonist. During World War II, some equally dotty boffin at the Air Ministry decided from Emett's complicated cartoons that the artist-a man as mild as Lewis Carroll's Dormouse-should be commandeered to help build nongentle-manly...
Born on the Fourth of July is an exception to this silence, and should be read. It is not brilliantly written; it is not an enduring piece of literature. A certain ideological simplicity mars what is otherwise a powerful commentary. His narrative often wanders into reminiscences that seem trivial. But precisely for these reasons, Born on the Fourth of July succeeds and is memorable. An intimate and convincing portrait of Kovic emerges: we permit him his autobiographical indulgences as well as his justified outrage. This serves to continually remind us that he is a real man choked with sincere anguish...
Freedom from Earth. It is difficult now to appreciate how trivial Calder's wire constructions must have looked in the '20s and '30s, when the word sculpture meant solidity. But their wit lasted. Time and again, one encounters feats of inspired and self-mocking draftsmanship, traced with wire in air: portraits of Jimmy Durante and the shimmying Josephine Baker, or a farouche she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus through six wooden drawer pulls that serve as her teats. Often there is a prophetic note. Calder's motorized sculptures of the '30s predict the kinetic...
...BIOGRAPHY of Celine, Patrick McCarthy, like others before him, traces the evolution of the author's racist and fascist attitudes from such relatively trivial incidents and jests to the collaborationist propaganda he spewed during World War II. But McCarthy diverges from the critical mainstream by treating the political pamphleteering as part of Celine's purely literary legacy. Typically, critics have turned to one of several options in dealing with Celine's work, ranging, from apolitical--some might say irresponsible--leniency to intransigent ideological indictment: Celine's politics have been ignored; explained away as the delirium of an unstable mind; excused...