Word: turgidity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...role of Fidelism in radical student culture. The spirit of Che synthesized all the ingredients of the New Left: an anti-American intellectual who galvanized the masses in one country and suffered glorious martyrdom in another. This vision of the radical's mission to redirect history made a somewhat turgid book called Revolution in the Revolution? a best seller. Feuer lists C. Wright Mills and Paul Goodman as the new radical heroes, though Herbert Marcuse has probably had as much influence as either at Harvard...
Three Issues. It is little wonder that most Frenchmen are unenthusiastic about the referendum. The text itself, which runs for 14 turgid pages, is enough to drive most voters away. Furthermore, the referendum demands a single answer on three totally different issues. One of them is De Gaulle's plan to decentralize French bureaucracy by taking much administrative power away from officials in Paris and giving it to the provinces. In pursuit of this goal, De Gaulle wants to consolidate France's 95 departments into 21 "economic regions" that will have their own legislatures...
...Marx Brothers at the Movies, (text by Zimmerman, graphics by Goldblatt) restores the team to its proper prominence. Customarily, the most static objects in the world are books about movies; pictures float by on oceans of turgid or fawning prose, while the subject drowns. In The Marx Brothers at the Movies the text is as good as the pictures. The still ones, that is; nothing can quite match the films. Zimmerman shows just how much Groucho could inscribe on the head of a pun: "This is indeed a gala day. That's plenty. I don't think...
...middlebrow porno that would bring about a best-selling marriage between the wandering tribe of former Salinger aficionadoes and Jacqueline Susann's camp followers. But Roth reads so quickly and so engagingly that much of what could pass for smut is more parody than prurience. The book lacks the turgid seriousness that marked Updike's Couples as a more perfect example of the genre. Portnoy--who admits to being "the Raskolnikov of jerking off"--refuses to be taken that seriously...
...premiere (1902) of Pelleas et Melisande complained of the work's "constant nebulosity" and of its "monotonous recitative, unbearable and moribund," remarks which are critical failures because they judge Debussy's original work by precisely the musical conventions which he renounced. His opera eschews the sumptuous polyphony, turgid mythologism, city-directory leit-motives, and vertiginous romanticism of the Ring. Debussy seeks a deeper organicism in which music is not grafted onto drama or drama is used as suggestion for musical contours, but rather where music and poetry are absorbed one into the other to yield an operatic metier of innocence...