Word: useful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...advice is weighty. Trilling chooses her words so well she might be reading from her new manuscript. The emphasis on style seems picky, but Trilling is no Emily Post. Social elitism, based on knowing which knife to use for pate, she said, is silly. When used properly style can ease both class and sexual distinctions. Manners let you act without awkwardness. They force people together. "Holding the door," she said, "at least makes you acknowledge that someone else exists...
...committee of imprudent MPs and gives them the task of rooting out immorality among their colleagues. As members of this special committee each inadvertently reveal pairs of panties pulled from back pockets and briefcases, you start wondering what has happened to Stoppard's proverbial cleverness. In Jumpers he used stage acrobatics to poke fun at and illuminate complicated philosophical questions; here he finds no better use for age-old sight gags than to keep his audience interested between long recitations of names of English inns...
Though Dirty Linen finds Stoppard in poor form as a thinker, it has its funny moments--when he resists the temptation to use simple bawdy humor and recovers his quirky intellectual muse. In the original London production of the show, the company had a sense of proportion, and carefully understated the strangeness of Stoppard's dialogue to make it sound more believable. Thus the show's introductory sequence--in which two MPs arrive in the committee room and converse for several minutes using only foreign cliches--succeeded through the lack of self-consciousness on the stage...
...university requires entering students to sign an honor code which states they will work diligently, seek the will of God through daily personal prayer and scriptural study, and devote their personalities to the Holy Spirit. Part of this agreement is a promise not to use profanity, gamble, smoke, drink, cheat, engage in immoral activity or use illegal drugs...
...moon. In Bertolucci's cosmos, there is neither night nor day, nor lunar cycles. Rather, there swims above us at all times, a huge flaccid orb, symbolizing-what? Bertolucci obviously doesn't know since this moon appears at any given moment, even in the early afternoon. This absurd use of the moon to symbolize essentially everything and nothing gives a hint of Luna's incoherency...