Word: turgid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Thurgus the Turgid. Nabokov, of course, does this sort of turn spectacularly well. Solemnly the lardwit betrays himself, reporting that Shade's friendship "was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed." But as the reader reads Kinbote's line-by-line commentary on the poem, he sees that the annotator is afflicted with something more than boobery. Sanely or not, Kinbote has it firmly in his head that he is the deposed king of "a distant northern land" called Zembla, and that he was known to his adoring subjects as Charles the Beloved, son of Alfin...
...possible to say that the best work on Horace is Reuben Brower's study of Alexander Pope's ancient models. Commager is the first classical scholar to attempt a close reading of the odes along modern lines, and he has succeeded brilliantly. (I omit from consideration Collinge's turgid and mechanical new book on structure in the odes...
...point, Leacock pokes fun at orthodox newsreels. He shows four or five men hovering around Kennedy, posing him for a canned, two-minute statement. After the intimacy that Leacock has put on the screen, this formal sitting seems as turgid and pompous as a commencement address...
Then there is the required reading, beginning each morning with the 30 or 40 pages of Hsinhua (the Communist New China News Agency) and the daily Peking radio transcript. It is turgid, tendentious and tedious. But the attention that the Chinese Communists give to Albania, or to confessions of crop failures in one province or another, provide clues to explore. A small colony of experts from the U.S., Britain, France, West Germany and Japan does the same job in Hong Kong, and there is much pooling of information. The U.S. consulate assembles a massive and useful Survey of the Mainland...
Contrarily refusing to accept this, O'Hara over the years wrote a succession of long, turgid novels that required two hands to hold, said not much, and invariably buckled of their own weight, since sight, sound and mood cannot sustain a span of 900 pages. Lately, however, he has begun writing short fiction again. Last year's trilogy of novellas, Sermons and Soda-Water, was a highly successful return to the style of his early work. Some of the stories in the present collection are even better...